Amnesia: Jennifer Caine

April 3, 2015 – June 6, 2015

Often using oil paint combined with marble dust to achieve lustrous matte surfaces, Jennifer Caine’s paintings emerge from an accumulation of layers. While her works may initially find inspiration from specific memories, elements from the environment, or the line of a poem, the references become unrecognizable as they are embedded in the strata of paint. Layers are built up and stripped away through scraping and sanding to expose colors and marks from earlier iterations. Caine’s paintings are rooted in the passage of time, memory and the physical world. The artist states, “As memory is fluid and labile, so are my paintings, informed by current decisions as well as by the history and legacy of the underlying layers.”

Caine’s etchings are equally striking. The varied and decisive marks she employs in several images appear to be solely abstract, while in others seem to suggest the contour of forms existing in the natural world.