Jennifer West
2005-2009
Jennifer West is a Los Angeles based artist, who for over ten years, has gained international recognition for her explorations of materialism in film. She started using direct film techniques in 2005, and has since produced eighty-two films. She has subjected every film stock to a range of substances including pepper spray, gamma rays or water from the Great Salt Lake and by staging interactive events where people are invited to perform actions to the filmstrips, like writing, throwing or kissing. The results are tactile, abstract documents of matter, action and idea, which are then transferred to a digital format and presented as projection. She uses a diverse range of approaches in her artistic practice, from her intensely haptic works that involve fluids and stains of all sorts, to her more recent ruminations on film and memory. “As an artist who works predominantly with the moving image, Jennifer West challenges the spectator to question the mercurial nature of media in the information age. Born in the middle of 20th century, with a childhood and adolescence that spanned the transition from analogue (film and print photography) to digital (consumer grade video), and now teac…
Films