Jenna Manzano is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. After growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in literature from University of California Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts in poetics from Mills College in Oakland. She then spent time volunteering and teaching in the Mills book art studio as well as studying and freelancing in graphic design. Jenna brings this uniquely blended background—the metaphorical, conceptual process of experimental poetics coupled with a distinct attention to the streamlined formal composition of design—to her current studio practice.
jenna@jennamanzano.com
I shape monochromatic fiber sculpture to resensitize capacities for deep attention and interconnectedness with each other and with ourselves. In centering repetitive practice and process, the forms elevate and emphasize the values of labor, time, and silence. Using tapestry weaving as a sculptural material, I shape and combine woven tubes and belts with wrapped cords, retaining the unruly fibers, variable edges, and twisting seams inherent to the raw material. Featuring the slubby texture and natural greyish-beige tone of undyed linen, the singular color and material directs focus to imperfect physical details, accentuating the innumerable and imperfect human gestures behind their construction (1).
My studio practice originates in the labor-intensive and methodical repetition required for a form to take authentic shape, where the process of becoming equates with and potentially transcends the object finally produced (2). Intentional immersion in an inefficient method presents an alternative to conventional measures of productivity, while representational refusal in the eventual object induces stillness to counter the visual and temporal spectacle of our contemporary cultural climate. In demanding a reclamation of more time with less content, the absurd process proposes and demonstrates the healing potential in modalities of deeper attention (3).
Repetitive process in Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke remain primary influences. Robert Morris’s felt pieces and Richard Serra’s early work in rubber lend to compositional experiments. I also turn to Franz Erhard Walther’s focus on the time and physicality of human interaction and empathy in First Work Set. All of this work relies on monochromatic materials leaving space for form, concept, and ambiguity.
Hesse, in her 1968 statement, writes “I want the work to be non-work…as a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing.”
This conceptual framework draws heavily on Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros and John Cage’s 4’33”, as well as his “Lecture on Nothing” and “Lecture on Something,” wherein he says “It is of the utmost importance not to make a thing but rather to make nothing. And how is this done? Done by making something which then goes in and reminds us of nothing.”