Natalie Jenkins is a visual artist currently working in San Francisco, California. She received an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, in 2020 and a BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR in 2014. Jenkins was awarded a Cultivate Grant from Art Council Santa Cruz County in 2021 and by the Seattle Art and Culture Commission in 2014. She has exhibited work in Portland, Or., Seattle, WA., Philadelphia, PA., Miami, FL., Chicago, Il., Los Angeles, Riverside, and Santa Cruz, CA.
Working primarily in sculpture, Jenkins explores the mediation of ‘seeing’ through physical obstruction and perceptual confusion. She draws inspiration from a broad palette of architecture, myth, allegory, and domestic custom to explore the abstractions underpinning cultural tradition with the acknowledgment that these structures are the basis of subjective vantage points. Surrealist in their representations, the objects are darkly goofy and prop-like, constructed out of simple materials such as papier-mâché. Visually uniting the work is a thematic grid and/or pattern to suggest a system of order and undefinable space. Each sculpture has an inside/outside quality; one must view the work through external punctures into its interior to piece together the entirety of the composition. Each work plays with how vision, memory, and imagination are conflated into an intelligible unified form.
Contact: natalieajenkins(at)gmail.com
CV