About the work

My work is often sited on that which is in the process of changing, becoming obsolete or disappearing. I am continually drawn to objects and images which have somehow lost their spatial, temporal or cultural moorings. Ghost Columns were made as part of a body of work titled The Composition of Decomposition (2013-2020) which was centered on newspapers, then beginning to change and dematerialize. The works were concerned with the material and structural aspects of newspapers, with changing patterns of reading, with collisions of image and text fragments, and with the ways meanings change in the passage from news to history.

Stacks of various kinds (from speaker stacks to architecture) have figured in my work for decades. Back in the day, stacks of newspapers could often be found in people’s homes waiting to be read, re-read or taken to the trash. They would be there but always in the background, overlooked, almost invisible. Ghost Columns, cast from stacks of newspapers, solidify and foreground these disappearing forms and through their proportions recall the narrow interior architecture of newspaper columns.

-Jennifer Bolande

About the artist

JENNIFER BOLANDE emerged as an artist in the late 1970s, working initially in dance, choreography, and drawing. In the early 1980s, influenced by Pop, Conceptualism, Arte Povera, and the “Pictures” artists, she began working with found material from the urban and media landscape, which she remixed and invested with idiosyncratic narratives. Exhibiting in New York at Nature Morte Gallery, Metro Pictures, Artists Space, and The Kitchen, Bolande was noted early on for her works exploring the materiality of photographs.

She uses various strategies and media including photography, film, sculpture, and installation to explore affinities and relationships and to convey embodied experience. For more than 30 years, Bolande has built a lexicon of recurring elements, which she recombines to generate new meanings as they pass from one context or material to another. Commonplace objects assume an unexpected stature and significance: stacked speaker cabinets become frames for pictures and stanzas in a concrete poem; layers of old newspapers solidify into monolithic columns; stills from 1940s pornographic films are cropped, turning the background into the main event; movie marquees, rather than fixed overhead, are brought down to earth and stacked like giant building blocks. Spinning things such as globes, vinyl records, washing machines, and tornadoes abound as do other references to motion. Her work examines what is changing, vestigial, or disappearing, and calls into question distinctions between event and object, real and imagined, and received and potential meanings. Resisting a fast read, the work draws attention to invisible forces—such as narratives, cultural codes, preconceptions, and projections—that condition human consciousness.

In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective of Bolande’s work was presented by INOVA in Milwaukee, WI, which also travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, CA. Her site-specific project, Visible Distance/Second Sight, was featured in the inaugural Desert X 2017 in Coachella Valley, CA. Solo exhibitions of her work have appeared at institutions and galleries around the world such as Kunstraum, Munich, DE; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, CH; Margo Leavin, Los Angeles, CA, Metro Pictures, NY, and most recently at Magenta Plains, NY. Her work was included in museum exhibitions such as Celebration of Our Enemies, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Readymades Belong to Everyone, Swiss Institute, New York, NY; Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, ES; Skyscraper, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; This Will Have Been: Art Love and Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (which travelled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA); Living Inside the Grid, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; and The Photogenic, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA. Bolande has been awarded fellowships from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Tesuque Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and Andy Warhol Foundation. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art at UCLA. Lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA.

More work by Jennifer Bolande

GHOST COLUMN NO. 4, 2019