Two Bizarre and Unexplained Deaths | George Jenne

Special Residency
Written By Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency

Digital video, radio transmitter and receiver, and installation featuring books and items from the collection.

Presented in a vintage mirror frame, George Jenne’s video installation patches together an apocalyptic tale from fragments of text woven from book collection sources as varied as Walker Percy’s novel “Love in Ruins,” a 1980s teen guide “Girl Talk,” and Anton Lavey’s “Satanic Bible.” The visual component of the work focuses on images of slowly turning plastic figurines, items of broken and dirty dime store kitsch, and domestic glassware that dissolve in and out of the frame. The audio component is detached from the image and is broadcast through a clock radio that accompanies the video. It is voice over narration delivered by the artist that recounts a bizarre and at times gruesome turn of events in which the narrator is implicated. Both in its process of construction and its final form, Jenne’s project deals with the notion of the fragment and the grotesque aspects of creation through recombination.

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George Jenne

George Jenne was born in Richmond, Virginia to a father who, at age ten, watched HIS father, Herb, a cold war spy, buckle the back brace that curled his spine as a disguise on the days that he left their German flat to insinuate himself into tense exchanges behind the iron curtain. A generation later, Herb, retired from espionage, secretly watched George sculpt his likeness in green clay, over the only armature he could find: a busty female mannequin, painted silver. The uncanny qualities of that facsimile brought George to Jim Henson’s Creature shop in Hollywood where, as a plebe,he was expected to watch all manner of abject videotapes under the gaze of an eight foot tall Big Bird, during lunch. He escaped California for New York, where he made movie props by day and exhibited art by night in spaces such as Exit Art, PS122 and Freight+Volume, trekking weekly to teach at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design. George currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he creates video, sculpture and prose for the sake of fakery, transgression, and a story well told.

George created Two Bizarre and Unexplained Deaths during his residency. 

Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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