Jennifer West
Historia
Jennifer West is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She was born in Topanga, California and received her MFA from Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California) in 2004 and her BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She studied with Mike Kelley and Diana Thater at Art Center. She is known for her digitized films that are made by hand manipulating film celluloid. She has produced over 70 films since she started working this way in 2004.
Director
Jennifer West won a 35mm film print of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert (1964) on Russian Ebay and dragged it along the Pink Beach off the coast of Sardinia, Italy, where some scenes of the film were shot. Fragments of coral and crushed shell create pink-hued sand that mark the surface of Antonioni’s first color film. Grains of sand and rocks coalesce upon and scratch the surface of the film, which was then transferred to HD frame by frame.
Director
Film Title Poem is comprised of over 500 film title cards.
Director
Saline bodies, water. Buckets, film. Materiality, memory. Erosion, elision. Time, travel. Spiral, Jetty. Salt Lake, Dead Sea. Jennifer West’s fervent materialism is by now well documented—strewn as her films are with materials, which she then indexes in her paragraph-long titles—as are the dialectical relationships she plumbs with awesome hallucinatory fever. Likewise, her films Spiral of Time Documentary Film and Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film (both 2013) materialize—no, metabolize—more of these things. Travelogues in the elliptical way that Tony Conrad’s black painted frames on paper, his seventies-era “Yellow Movies,” were movies, West’s recent films are admixtures of shot images and abstract, material traces, in the acid-y palette that is her signature.
Director
Geological elements and erosion leave marks on a strip of 70mm film that floated in the Dead Sea and soaked in clay before getting stuffed in a suitcase to be brought back to Los Angeles, where it was submerged and sat in buckets filled with mud and salt for years in the artist’s studio. After five years, Jennifer West dragged the film along the mud and salt crystal encrusted spiral of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty before throwing it in the icy pink waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake—the film’s frames were then digitally photographed and re-stitched together. Through material traces of mud, salt crystals and sand, distant places and layered temporalities flicker across a film that lasts less than one minute.
Director
5,280 feet of 35mm film negative and print taped to the mile-long High Line walk way in New York City for 17 hours on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 with 11,500 visitors - the visitors walked, wrote, jogged, signed, drew, touched, danced, parkoured, sanded, keyed, melted popsicles, spit, scratched, stomped, left shoe prints of all kinds and put gum on the filmstrip.
Director
16mm film negative sanded with surfboard shaping tools, sex wax melted on, squirted, dripped, splashed, sprayed and rubbed with donuts, zinc oxide, cuervo, sunscreen, hydrogen peroxide, tecate, sand, tar, scraped with a shark’s tooth, edits made by the surf and a seal while film floated in waves.
Director
70mm film kissed with lipstick & impressed with teeth marks.
Director
Skinnydipping Carbon Beach Malibu Film – In Front of David Geffen's House (16MM color and b&w film neg sprayed with fried pickle juice, painted with Bloody Marys using, celery stalks & ash from the Malibu fires, submerged in the ocean – skinnydipping by Renee Lotenero, Lia Trinka-Browner, Karen Liebowitz & Jwest – lit by the full moon & search lights)
Director
16mm color negative, positive and b&w negative scratched with tumbleweed, tire treads, pine needles, sprinkled with BlackJax extreme energizers pills, coffee, donuts, hot cheetohs & doused with gasoline & gatorade
Director
16mm color and b&w film neg rolled with hard boiled eggs, oranges, lemons, avocados, pickles, green apples, milk and watermelon – a remake of a scene from Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film, Daisies – rolling off the bed performances by: Mariah Csepanyi, Finn West & Jwest, lit with black light & strobe light.
Director
70mm film leader lined with liquid black eyeliner, doused with Jello Vodka shots and rubbed with body glitter.
Director
Tar pits form as petroleum seeps to the surface through fissures in the Earth’s crust, leaving viscous asphalt pools. To make Tar Pits Film, Jennifer West threw a strip of film into the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, still-bubbling asphalt pools which have seeped from the ground for tens of thousands of years. The film was then ridden over hot asphalt by a motorcycle and drenched in other substances including thick mayonnaise and body lotion.
Director
16 and 35mm film negative tangled inside darkened film tent for ten hours and exposed to: neutron, gamma and alpha sources and quantum dots in liquid scintillator
