KATERINA JEBB

By Dorothée Perret

 

The cold appeal of an object placed upon a glass plate of a scanner is one of my obsessions, as is scanning human beings. The two mediums are in visual conflict. One is clean and spare, a reproduction of an intimate object. The living subject is messy and unpredictable. — Katerina Jebb, in Language, Nudity, Smoking

 

 

HAPHAZARD

The artist Katerina Jebb didn’t plan to be a photographer, nor an artist. Neither did she receive a formal education in art, cinema, or photography. She found it on her own. Or one can wonder if these disciplines didn’t find her? She was brought up a strict Catholic by the nuns. And it’s through the environment of the church that she first encountered the beauty of painting and objects. Since then, a sense of the sacred and an aesthetic search has never ceased to accompany her work.

At age twenty-two she discovered photography on a trip to Los Angeles. There she formed meaningful friendships among art students, some of whom had had Chris Burden as a teacher. Being exposed to conceptual art-making by proxy helped her figure out experimental photography. From her garage she started to take portraits of her entourage by playing with techniques like toys. She used mirrors to reflect light on her subjects and exposed her film several times to create unconventional images. A chance meeting of elements orchestrated by semi-controlled chaos. As a self-taught artist, Jebb is naturally drawn by inventiveness, and this fondness for exploration remains true today.

 

 

THE ART OF PORTRAITURE

Since the early 1990s, following a serious accident that resulted in the loss of the proper use of her right arms, Jebb has been using a scanner to create work. The reproduction of objects and people using this new technique created an original body of work, one that challenges the classical canon, while entering debate with significant form. A term coined by art critic Clive Bell to demonstrate the idea that the form of an artwork—or the forms within it—can convey emotion, meaning, or expression independently of any connection to realistic imagery, Bell’s theory of significant form was explained in his 1914 book Art. The book begins with the lines: “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?” The answer, according to Bell, is “significant form,” which he goes on to describe as, “lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, [that] stir our aesthetic emotions.” There is a certain soulfulness in the choice and rendering of Jebb’s subjects and objects. Particularly reverberative is the series Corpus on Frida Kahlo, where Kahlo’s belongings become a vibrant vehicle of pain and sorrow under Jebb’s attention and care.

The making of a portrait is a difficult process for both the subject, who needs to stand still, and Jebb, who is scanning by hand, piece by piece. It can entail hundreds of takes to achieve one portrait. And from this entanglement between the three elements—the maker, the scanner, and the sitter—rises a fragmented world, which is reassembled later in kaleidoscopic shapes by Jebb. The creation of these unique works requires the physical effort of sculpture, yet the end result is viewed like a hanging picture.

 

 

LANGUAGE AND POETRY

To tranquilize herself from the exhaustion of making human portraits, Jebb started to create a series of text-based works. One of them is currently on view at Sotheby’s Paris as part of Attention, Fragile!, an exhibition curated by Sarah Andelman. Jebb compares the work to “a computer-generated stimulating game,” and she appreciates the distance it gives her from “flesh and form.” It’s immediate, she says, “like Polaroid, and as a form of expression it’s light, medium, and dark.” When asked why she choose to type the words instead of writing them by hand, she explains that the origin of the work comes from a magazine cutting which states, “I’ve been trying to fuck my career up for years,” which she made a scan of and framed. She started with four-letter words, and then borrowed words of great length from literature and pop culture such as “Honorificabilitudinitatibus” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

Looking at the grid of words, one wonders if Jebb’s intention is to create a work within a work, as if she was composing meaningful sentences and for each word to resonate with one another. She confirms she’s trying to bring a sense of humor into the work, which can be read in many ways vertically and horizontally. Even if “ruminating on the subject of language” comes from the same obsession she nourishes with the portraits and objects, perhaps here the work is nothing but an image of poetry.

I go where I love and where I am loved,

In the snow;

I go to the things I love

With no thought of duty or pity

–H.D., The Flowering of the Road

 

 

Katerina Jebb’s upcoming exhibition at Galerie 7L in Paris will open in the spring of 2025 and feature a video work of Tilda Swinton.

 

 

See link katerinajebb.com for more info.

 

 

Katerina Jebb, from top: Frida Kahlo Wheelchair 1-3 (2022); Moist is a Five Letter Word (2023); Erotic is a Six Letter Word (2023); Duchamp is a Seven Letter Word (2023); Francis Picabia Pencil Sharpener 1-3 (2012); Tilda Swinton Simulacrum & Hyperbole (2011); I’ve been trying to fuck my career up for years (2016); Blond Medium (1997); Grande Horizontale (2016).

Images courtesy and © Katerina Jebb.