Jenene Nagy is a visual artist living and working in the Inland Empire. Recent solo venues include PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland), Iris Project (Los Angeles), Art on Paper (NY), University of Wisconsin – Stout, and the Minneapolis College of Art + Design. Her work has been recognized with grants and awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the Oregon Arts Commission, Colorado Creative Industries, the Ford Family Foundation and in 2016 a nomination for the United States Artist Fellowship. Her work is held in several permanent collections including the Portland Art Museum and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. Reviews of Nagy’s work have appeared in Monopol, the Boston Globe, The Oregonian, and Artscape Magazine.
Along with a rigorous studio practice, Nagy is one half of the curatorial team TILT Export:, an independent art initiative with no fixed location, working in partnership with a variety of venues to produce exhibitions. From 2011-12 she was the first Curator-in-Residence for Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon.
Based on a series of graphite works on paper, The Weight is a suite of prints that engages in discourse surrounding ideas of imagehood and objectness. Three-dimensional constructions of folded silk are used to create abstracted images that are directly informed by the physicality of their making. Much like the drawings, the prints in The Weight utilize simple materials of graphite and paper to question notions of materiality and value.
The printmaking process is used both as a method of making as well as a metaphor. Here, something new is produced from an intense pressure allowing for a different kind of understanding of the world around us, transforming that which we think we know.
