Collaboration with Andy Gutierrez

Collaboration with Salvador Fuentes

Beyond her artistic endeavors, JenMarie boasts an impressive 20-year career in the private sector and various philanthropic and social justice nonprofits, successfully navigating the intricacies of distinct institutional structures. Her formal education includes a BA in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, as well as a Masters in Global Affairs from New York University. She has also worked at the United Nations and outside of the U.S. Drawing from her extensive travels and introspective explorations, JenMarie's manifold worldview shapes her practice, infusing it with authenticity and depth.

JenMarie is an emerging artist, receiving a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, with solo exhibitions at New Village Arts in Carlsbad, CA, “Cultivating Dreams in Unlikely Places,” from April to May 2024, and "Trust in My Frame," at the Collateral Collective in San Diego, CA, in July 2023. Collaboration lies at the heart of her creative process, and she has worked alongside the Paul McCobb Museum in Los Angeles, CA, as well as numerous other esteemed artists.

Artist Statement

My multi-disciplinary artistic practice is grounded in photography, writing, movement, performance, and community. As a California artist, signals of sun, sky, ocean, and freeways inform my body of work and timeless aesthetic. I take an alchemist approach to storytelling in order to transform personal and collective wounds. Critical to my practice is a focus on style and design through moments of play and laughter, gut-checks and stillness, connection and curiosity.

Forms 

I tell stories using my own face, the movements of my body, and those of the collective body and environment. My words as a writer, lens as a photographer, sweep of my arm as a dancer, and pose as a model consider the intersection of visual planes and light. My practice seeks to unravel psychological and physical knots by transforming emotions and shapes into new creative works. 

Environment

I compose and frame mise-en-scenes by working with what is present, be it my face or the existing environment. My creative direction uses my physical body, social body, and spatial bodies – architecture, lightscapes, visual frames, and vectors – as sites of study and practice. I construct, disclose, and assert my own identity just as I am drawn to the images, forms, and constructions created by others.

Multiplicity 

My experience as a traveler – both around the world map and in my own inner world – guides my practice. During my 20-year career, I have moved between social silos and institutional structures including religion, marriage/divorce, and a number of professional roles in both the private sector as well as international, philanthropic, and social justice nonprofits. These experiences have not only informed my manifold world view, but have also developed my relationship with the lived and inherited histories underscoring my work. 

Purpose

The purpose of my work is to create narratives that center women, agency, vulnerability, and pleasure. My artistic practice is a project of integration, one that looks both backward and forward from the present, as I weave together my experiences in order to question conventions of history, narrative, and voice. My intention is to study and then unravel these conventions by looking at the inherited social constructs that impact me, my collaborators and partners, and the generations to follow. I hope to leave behind a mark – an indelible imprint – that allows the subject, object, and heart of my work to claim generative space by decreasing degrees of dominance and increasing roots of possibility.