Jenn Sova (they/she) is an artist, organizer, and arts laborer.
Her interdisciplinary art practice focuses on traces of what’s left behind; from the trash of our everyday lives to ghosts of homes we’ll never know or know all too well. Through moving images, sculptural installations, found objects, archives, and communal dialogue she explores duration, anxiety of loss, and the precariousness of being human.
Sova’s work has been exhibited at Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), Center for Contemporary Art & Culture (Portland, OR), Local Project (Long Island, NY), One One Six Two Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and The Dojo (Chicago, IL). Her work has been screened at venues including the Chicago Cultural Center as a part of MANA Contemporary’s Body + Camera Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as a part of Chicagoland Shorts Film Festival, and Open Signal PDX. Alongside collaborator Jeanne Donegon, she participated in Czong Institute for Contemporary Art’s International Symposium for Visual Culture 2020 and exhibition in Gimpo, South Korea. She was a LAUNCH resident at Chicago Artist Coalition and participated in the Multitude Residency at The Overlook. Sova received a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago with concentrations in Women’s and Gender Studies and Arts Business. In 2016 she founded The Overlook, a nomadic arts project to support BIPOC, Femme, and Queer makers and thinkers through residencies, exhibitions, and public programming. Sova currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Artist Statement
My artistic praxis is an act of resistance and healing. I collect, arrange, ask, and ask again, as a way to make sense of and reimagine the world. Through these gestures, I begin to find or construct connections that are often overlooked. The tracings of these connections manifest through still and moving images, archives, sculpture, installation, and performance; often blurring the boundaries of each. No matter the medium, my goal is to create space for pause, for looking, for questioning, for attention, and for response.
I work with familiar domestic and bodily materials that through recontextualization hold a strangeness that disrupts expected comfort. Using found family photos as stand-ins to examine performed proximity, living flowers as surrogates to explore care, or mirrors as a tool of critique; I build new visual relationships as an attempt for collective healing.
My current work and research explore generational trauma, caretaking, and isolation through the gleaning of found archival footage and organic matter. I collect and reposition these materials to form new questions about responsibility and expectations within familial love.