Jenna Collins

jennacollinspa@gmail.com
CV







The Ballards and Damp and Buttery ( 2024)

Video, 02:30

‘The Ballards and Damp and Buttery’ (02:30, 2024) folds three small sections of ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ (included in ‘Wait With Your Friends and Do Your Best to Stay There’) into some of the material that shaped it, namely, sub broadcast recordings of lectures and discussions produced by the engineering departments of significant organisations and institutions. Built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense, ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ prematurely announces and undermines the win.







Wait With Your Friends and Do Your Best to Stay There (2024)

Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-7392596-9-3

Featuring, ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’, text version.

- Published by JOAN PUBLISHING












Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers  (2023)


Built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense) prematurely announces a victory.

Radio version:
Commissioned by @ooo_radio 
Street and exhibition broadcast
- Forumbox Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. 10 - 12/11/23

Performance version
Invited by The Trajectory of a Baseball: Maureen de Jager / Jenna Collins / Christian Newby
-Quadrangle Studio, London, 6 March, 2023
 








One, 2, 3 (2021)

Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9993276-2-0

Exploiting forms that traditionally get burnt up in the production of the moving image, Jenna Collins' One, 2, 3 moves through sequences of writing that dramatize the small but necessary acts of theft and invention that shape a story in its telling. In this case, one that navigates the legacy of a dead female writer and the task of being a living artist.

One, 2, 3 is a splendid feast made from the broken bits at the bottom of the bag. Bitingly funny, with a peculiar slippy charm that lodges its subversive truths about making art deep in the bones.
- Kate Feld

In Jenna Collins’ One, 2, 3 an inexplicable locating occurs. We are led into rooms, views, situations and scenarios with no real notion of how we came to be wherever we are but at the same time finding ourselves as the unwitting witness to certain meticulousnesses, certain claustrophobic, often absurd, unbalancings, events, processes. The possibility appears to be offered of dipping one’s fingers into the pockets of the text and running off like a thief and indeed the placing of incidences, sometimes faintly mirroring, sometimes set inside - or resting obliquely against - the other, does leave the reader free from consecutive narrative but at the same time, oddly trapped even implicated in what unfolds and what doesn’t.
- Paul Becker

- Launch event, ICA bookshop, 11th July 2022.

Published by JOAN PUBLISHING










The September Garden (2020–2022)

We Are Publication

Modes of collage have been a central preoccupation for the artists group We Are Publication (WAP). Participants have now set out to explore whether they can cultivate an artwork that is ‘grown’ from several discreet constituents. To this end WAP has drawn on contemporary American poet Rosemarie Waldrop’s recent appellation ‘gap gardening’ to suggest that the placement of words (and plants) generates intermedial zones of transformation and potential.

Capacity does not explain but cultivates a September garden (2022)
Newsprint edition
- Whitstable Biennale

September Garden: The Plots  (2021)
Digital jounal article
+ KOKO in Dialogue: Jenna Collins (Kingston University) in conversation with Nils Röller (ZHdK)
-KOKO Journal

Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden (2020)
Online commision (video/text)
-Camden Art Centre ‘Public Knowledge’ programme, 07/09/2020 - 29/11/2020










Internal Dissolve (2020)

Video 05:21

‘Internal Dissolve’ is imagined as a tourist video of sorts. The assembled material constitutes a hot crowd containing an extract from a Pier Paolo Pasolini screenplay, tourist footage (frequently the artist’s own) and footage from people testing camera functions only to get distracted by details of the world made special by the viewfinder. The tourist is adept at being a bit bored and then engrossed by some thing or other, a speculating presence engaged in, or thinking about, the possibility and cost of further escapes.

-Commissioned by the Stanley Picker Public Lectures and Events series at Kingston School of Art









Only Three Actors (2020)

Text (extract below)

‘You mean an ‘internal dissolve’?

The ship would already be far away, sailing toward the high seas, an imperceptible point on the blue.

Then it would probably fade…

Remember that it would be filmed in real life, this scene: ‘stolen’ in cinematographic jargon. So, extras are not necessary, only the three actors and the image of a ship, far away, small, fading into the liquid ground, dissolving into the sea, being ingested by it, or passing so far away that vision reaches its limit, folds in on itself, is forced to improvise. This bright, open image is inhaled with the
instruction, with its own ‘internal dissolve’. But which internal?

The lungs? Who doesn’t breathe deeply when facing the sea…’


-The Kink in the Arc is a collective, dream novel. Invited writers, artists and curators contribute a description of an artwork in any form, these descriptions are then ‘sited’ within the context of the novel: an overheard conversation between two residents in a ‘sanatorium for the weary of image’. 
- Paul Becker

-Contribution to: The Kink in the Arc, Paul Becker




 




t  h  e      H O L D  (2019)


‘t  h  e      H O L D is an exhibition by the artists’ group We Are Publication (WAP) featuring contributions from over 50 artists. It consists of posters, a soundscape, a hand-woven carpet, and a series of live events all set within an expansive sculptural display structure occupying the gallery space.

- Stanley Picker Gallery, London. 
Exhibtied 26 September - 14 December

-Machine Mountain (audio component by John Hughes, Volker Eichelmann and Jenna Collins)
Broadcast 2020 on  https://radiophrenia.scot









Photography Ellie Laycock





We Are the Road (2019)

Practice PhD

AHRC scholarship (TECHNE)
Centre for Useless Splendour (Contemporary Art Research Centre), Kingston University 2019
Supervisors: Volker Eichelmann and Dr Roman Vasseur
Examiners: Stephen Sutcliffe and Fran LLoyd

Abstract: 









We.Are.Cut.Up (2019)


We.Are.Cut.Up. expands on central preoccupations around cut-up, fragmentation and modes of collective re-composition and re-assemblage. We.Are.Cut.Up. consists of a soundscape and a series of posters, both specifically conceived for the DeKalb Gallery at Pratt Institute, New York.

- Audio component broadcast TACO Art Licks Weekend Radio RTM.FM

- Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, USA




We Are the Road (2018)

Video, 10:15 (01:55 extract of 10:15)

In 1987, Stewart Brand wrote an evangelical account of the MIT Media Lab in which he asserted, ‘If you are not part of the steamroller, you are part of the road’. In this brutal formulation, the producers of technologies are active and the consumers, passive.

'We Are the Road' considers the position of the viewer and occupies the space of ‘the road’. It takes the activity of the viewer at the moment of viewing seriously, seeking to voice, thicken, complicate and formally double the encounter, refuting the notion that anything about this activity is passive.

- London International  Film Festival BFI, London (2018)
- Videographic Entanglements conference, University of Huddersfield (2023)
- Screening and commissioned text, Authoring Agents by Donald Butler, LUX Scotland (2019)
- Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba. October (2017)
- Gotland Art Museum, Visby, Sweden (2017)






Internal Dissolve (2018)

Newsprint publication
60 cm x 30cm

Newsprint publication that proposes making  writing under the influence of the moving image by expanding upon an extract from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s screenplay, St Paul (1977), which did not secure funding to become a film.

‘What would it be to dissolve internally, or to fade? Like a night of serious drinking I imagine, but I know this is Marseille and a population of fictional sailors -unpaid extras sharing cigarettes -are pressing in.’

- Dublin Art Book Fair at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2018)
- Aquired by The National Irish Visual Arts Library as part of the Broken Diorama collection (2018)






Ronald and the Nomoli (2018)

Performance with Alice Rekab

Script v.1 (extract)

(In the gallery space, a light change from general exhibition setting to darkness except for the screens)
MUSIC begins to play loudly.

(Spotlight on RONALD and spotlight on THE CRAB as the dialogue, a bad natured interview, begins)

RONALD: So I notice that you are here with a crab, I think it’s a crab, I hope you will allow me to continue with my line of questioning even if I have misidentified the subject, it’s irrelevant to me. One thing can stand for another in a fairly imprecise way as long as you can be precise about the connection. So, perhaps I am taking a liberty by turning the crab thing into an algae thing, but that it crawls out of the water is the important thing, crawling out of the water and being in the sun...


- Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, Ireland (2019)
- The Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2018)
- Five Years Gallery, London  (2018)





Studio (2017)

Newsprint collage group 
(5 x 40cm x 50cm)

Series of collages of processed photographic images in newsprint form, developed following a residency on Gotland, Sweden, engaging with it’s film industry infrastructue.

- Exhibited Gotland KunstMuseum, Sweden
- Exhibited Casa Victor Hugo, Cuba
- Exhibited, FIVE YEARS gallery, London





Two External Light Sources at the Same Time (2018)

Exhibition (with Alice Rekab)

Works included:
Ronald (2017) Airdrying clay bust
Studio (2017) Newspring group
People Test Cameras (2018) Video

- Five Years Gallery, London  (2018)



The Grand Alliance (2016)


The Grand Alliance is named after the consortium of American companies brought together in 1993 for the purpose of developing an HDTV standard, a process as personal, political and commercial, as it was technological or aesthetic. The project responds to the libidinal, comedic and delusional impulses present in the archival material, thinking about what we attach to the promise of ever better images and how we imagine the process by which they are arrived at. 

Throughout April, Jenna Collins undertook a residency within the online and physical space of Quick Millions, producing an unreliable history of HDTV in the form of a screenplay and associated material.

-Exhibited, Quick Millions, London (2016)




Someone Who Isn’t Me (2015)

Video, 09:20

‘Narratives mined from online drug user support forums, where codified anonymising practices create an uncanny duality of simultaneous intimacy and disavowal.' 

-Benjamin Cook, LUX

- London International Film Festival, Experimenta strand,  (2015) 
- Art Bermondsey Project Space, London (2016)
- Akbank Short Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey (2016)
- Intimate Space, St Petersburg, Russia (2016)
- Transart Institute Research, Berlin, Germany (2017)






Polygraph (2015)


‘This workspace, pieces of equipment, cables, and the production of a wave image on screen strikes me, as I am occupied with making the music, as reminiscent of  the set-up of a polygraph examination. It was also reminiscent of the scenario of the captain’s deck on a ship. I am the captain, my tools around me –my monitors and my controls. I am imagining workspaces, and further workspaces come to mind, those in School Is a Factory, 1978-80 by Allan Sekula, particularly the image of the computer programmer whom Sekula describes in the text element of the artwork as 'solemn'. He looks at the camera flatly as he stands sandwiched behind a shelf of huge, open binders and in front of wardrobe-sized computing machines. ‘

- BBC Radio 3 Late Junction, guest hosted by Hannah Catherine Jones (2018)
- Radiophrenia Highlights for Radio Space Borealis in Bergen, Norway (2018)
- Radiophrenia, CCA, Glasgow  (2017)
- Radio Quantica, Lisbon, Portugal (2017)