Jennifer Sirey Solo Exhibition at AMoCA

January 31 - March 16, 2025

Artist talk and reception: Friday, January 31, 5:30 - 7:00PM

Public dinner for the artist to follow.

Jennifer Sirey’s sculptures are both architecture and viscera. She developed an original technique to construct living sculptures by collaborating with the fermentation culture acetobacter, which exists in colonies throughout the natural world. Rigid glass tanks establish logical structures where fleshy planes, blown glass, and wax forms are suspended. The works contain worlds that are also extracorporeal bodies. Each piece stands elevated and exposed...presenting the inside to the outside. Meticulous parameters are set for substances to behave naturally as the sculptures literally grow into themselves. A glass tank is constructed, filled with a mixture of mother culture and wine, and tilted until the level surface forms a geometric shape. The mother generates a translucent skin cast upon armatures, eventually becoming a thick polygonal plane. When all layers have grown, the tank is flushed and filled with diluted vinegar so the biological constructions are sharply visible. Inside the works, submerged microbes lie torpid and alive. 

Jennifer’s studio processes aim to embody nature’s expression. Molten wax is poured and set in a tilted glass tank on the surface of water, sometimes removed to be cast into metal. Dynamic, wiggly textures created by gravity and hydrodynamics mimic the geological, biological, macro, and micro, solidifying a moment. Patterns move around and through us and all things, essence. 

Organic chemistry composes geometric shapes. A common cliche, “beauty is on the inside,” triggers a search through iterations of inner structures, hidden aberrations, or a gem. Glass jars and tubes invade and penetrate the sculpture’s already see-through skin. The works mend and transcend by training viscera into geometric form, inviting balance and renewal. Paper pulp forms like open wounds and secret codes are embedded into wood bases. We are porous patterns of energy. On stages, tanks of microbial overgrowth and wax-on-water events are displayed as objects of admiration. Bacterial slabs are sanguine freak flags floating and flaunting.

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