Anthony Graham on Angie Jennings

Over the past several years, Angie Jennings has prodded at the systems of power, control, and subjugation that stratify contemporary life. Through painting, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Jennings has produced a body of work that is mysterious, dynamic, and brims with an evocative intensity. Jennings addresses everyday, human experiences, informed by both a historical consciousness and critical theory.

I first encountered the artist’s work while she was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego in 2016. During the program’s annual Open Studios, I sat in on a performance in which Jennings, in a persona, sang karaoke to YouTube videos. In place of a sign-up sheet for participation, viewers were invited to add songs to Jennings’s ever-extending setlist. A fog machine filled the small space, creating a smoky, humid atmosphere where one struggled to see beyond what was immediately in front of them. As the performance continued, Jennings sang with little affectation or variation to her voice. If not for the pauses in music, each song seemed to drone into the next. This created a tension that appears in much of the artist’s work—a back and forth between agency and vulnerability, clarity and confusion.

In this and other performances, Jennings transforms into THE STIGMA FOG SAINT, which she first developed during the La Pocha Nostra performance workshop in Tijuana. Over the years, this persona has developed from its earliest incarnation as a nameless, witch-like figure into its present status as a saint. She wears a large white bed skirt and her painted white face is covered with a lace veil. At times, she is silent, with a fake red hibiscus flower held in her mouth. THE STIGMA FOG SAINT celebrates the many forms of stigma that exist within our society, subverting forms of oppression into the sacred.

Stigma itself has become a generative idea within Jennings work. In her MFA thesis exhibition, she articulated the complexity of social hierarchies and violence structured around various markers of identity. Staged in near-total darkness, Jennings suspended a series of paintings from above and divided the space with billowing curtains of clear plastic. Rather than making visible ideas which are often invisible, Jennings renders them material. Stigma is, of course, already a physical experience. But here, she deliberately uses obfuscation as a way to confound quick, visual assumptions. In her densely layered paintings, Jennings uses yarn, dipped in paint, to draw figures that hover at the edge of recognizability. Through this play with abstraction, Jennings conceives a new form of visibility.

Jennings has regularly explored what exactly it means to be visible—in particular for those who are othered by societal constructs, such as race and gender. And with her performances and paintings, Jennings activates distinct ways of both viewing and inhabiting the body. Her exhibition Extinct Paradise (Abode Gallery, 2018) extended her attention to trauma as an individual experience to consider the collective burden of environmental crisis.

The natural world, like the othered body, is a site of exploitation. In these paintings, Jennings combines thick layers of paint with feathers and beads. Like her Stigma Fog paintings, these are made on domestic fabrics, but each piece was made outdoors, and includes natural materials such as sand and compost. Drawing from numerous mythologies and forms of symbolism, Jennings reflects on the effects of social and environmental tragedy, dedicating each painting to a natural element.

Recently, Jennings has created a number of chalk pastel drawings, focusing on representing her subjects directly. In Familiar Spirit (Best Practice, 2019) three drawings of animals were suspended from the ceiling, as if overseeing the installation, which included four figurative sculptures brought together in a candlelight vigil. Jennings depicts a single animal in each of the three drawings: a snake, a rabbit, and a hawk. With her abiding interest in the metaphoric associations of the natural world, Jennings points to a medieval belief in supernatural guides, which take on animal forms and were known as “familiar spirits.” The snake coils around an apple, an image of both temptation and withheld knowledge. The rabbit suggests fertility and the new life cycle of spring. The hawk, with its sharp eye, signifies a sense of intuition. 

While the ceremonial and the bodily have always been primary concerns, here they have manifested in an arrangement that appears both theatrical and static. Without the live presence of performance, the sculptures appear like surrogates. Each figure is seen in a moment of violence and distress, like a tableau of recent political horrors or perhaps even altars to be revered. Woman Shot With Arrow (2019) is pierced by an arrow, her body covered in red and frozen in a state of collapse. A television sits at her feet, a shattered indication of the ways violence is recorded and witnessed. Child With Pink Hair Looking into Black Hole (2019) sits alone atop a stack of bricks, recalling the border wall that dominates xenophobic political discourse amidst the ongoing separation of children from their families. Suspended on the wall, the androgynous Angel (2019) holds a purse with a live peace lily, a hopeful symbol of sympathy and care in the wake of the loss. 

From behind this scene, Figure with Cap and Tiki Torch (2019) crouches as if about to pounce. If each of the previous figures has been violated, here we see a cause. Personifying white supremacy, patriarchy, and institutionalized hate, the figure holds a rope and chain whip in its hand—strung with a keychain that reads, “I’m a loveaholic.” A poignant reminder of the Unite the Right riot in South Carolina in 2017, the figure might almost be imagined in a downward bow, perhaps offering hypocritical thoughts and prayers for those before him.

With the animals looking from above, Jennings constructs her own sort of divine, mythological universe. In her memorial-like sculptures, Jennings lays bare the monstrous systems that empathize with certain bodies while assaulting others. And with a reverence for unseen forces—both good and bad—she provides new opportunities for understanding embodiment and presence.

Anthony Graham is Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

[Image descriptions by Anthony Graham.]