bio Jenn Sova (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist working between installation, video, archives, and writing. Sova’s queer feminist practice is an act of resistance and healing. Her recent research and work is focused on volcanos as literal and conceptual symbols of destruction and resilience. An iteration of this work was exhibited Fall 2023 as her solo show, Volcano. It was an exploration of women’s rage; a geological survey of destruction at the hands of patriarchal violence. Weaving connections between organic materials such as moss, ash, rocks, and flowers with research and archival media depictions of violence and survival.
Sova has held solo exhibitions at Paragon Arts Gallery at Portland Community College, Rubus Discolor Project, and after/time Collective + Gallery all located in Portland, OR. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), Center for Contemporary Art & Culture (Portland, OR), 1122 Outside Gallery (Portland, OR), One One Six Two Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and The Dojo (Chicago, IL). Her video works have 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, Open Signal PDX, and Southsound Experimental Film Festival (Seattle & Portland). Her curatorial projects include Too Long; Did’t Read, a group exhibition at Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), Rhizome Reading Residency, a text-based residency (virtual), and DREADFUL, a group exhibition at In House (Chicago, IL).
Before relocating to the Pacific Northwest in 2020, Sova spent a decade in Chicago. There she received a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and founded The Overlook, a nomadic arts project to support BIPOC, Femme, and Queer makers and thinkers through residencies, exhibitions, and public programming.
statement
My art praxis moves between making, curating, researching, collaborating, and connecting. 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 gendered violence, generational trauma, caretaking, and isolation through the gleaning of found archival footage and organic matter.