Candace Jensen: Deep Green Query

Candace Jensen: Deep Green Query

March 5 - September 13, 2020*

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Deep Green Query, an exhibition of new calligraphic works on paper by Candace Jensen. The show opened on Friday March 6th, 2020. 

A virtual gallery tour was held on April 18, 2020 and the full discussion can be viewed here: Candace Jensen Virtual Gallery Tour. Details of the works on view are available on Artsy. 

A Poetics of Ecology Salon was held on Friday, March 27, from 7-9 PM. The event featured readings by guest poets John James, Lynn Xu and Timothy Donnelly as well as conversation & refreshments. Limited edition poetry broadsides will be available for sale at the closing event. 

A closing reception will be held on Sunday, September 13, 11 AM to 3 PM, at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY. 

Jensen uses hand-made inks, herbs, pigments, and gold leaf on paper to create decorated essays and book-arts musings in the tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Her explicit intent is to expand the scope of illumination’s cultural reliquary beyond that of religion and anthropocentrism. In lieu of illuminating archetypal content such as Abrahamic scriptures and humanistic poetry, which centralize human experience and the myth of Progress, Jensen’s Gaia lluminations articulate interdependence and decentralize humanity’s vantage, even human language. The works offer an alternative canon of cyclical and interrelated systems, or Gaia theory, and old myths reinterpreted in gold and ink for new eyes.

Deep Green Query features the artist’s continued investigation into Deep Ecology, and the reconsideration of human spiritual relationships to the earth through critical theory and empathic writing. Deep Ecology, or Deep Green Theory, is an environmental philosophy and social movement based on the belief that dominant human cultures must radically change their relationship to nature from one that values nature solely for its usefulness to human beings, to one that recognizes that nature has an inherent value outside of the false objectivity of a human perspective. Legibility, language, nomenclature, storytelling and symbolic abstraction all figure into Jensen’s playful, yet deadly serious treatment of these complex ideas and ideologies.

Candace Jensen is a visual artist, writer, calligrapher and practicing Tantric. She has exhibited work in Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and Antwerp, Belgium. Her artwork has been featured in Studio Visit Magazine, as well as the Royal Academy of the Arts biannual KoMASK Masters Printmaking publication. Jensen is committed to realizing a culture profoundly informed by deep ecology. She is the Book Arts and Letterpress Programming Director at the Ruth Stone House in Central Vermont, and the founder of In Situ Polyculture Commons, an artist residency in S Vermont opening in 2021. She is a current artist member at Amos Eno Gallery, where she collaborates as an exhibiting artist and curator. Jensen earned her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA, in 2018, and her BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2008, also in Philadelphia. Jensen lives in Southern Vermont, part of unceded traditional lands of the Western Abenaki Peoples, N'dakinna. Deep Green Query is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.