Artist File
July 21, 2023
Artist Spotlight: See Jen Mann’s Colorful Work
In our Artist File column, art advisor Diana Hamm of WK ART shares the artists that have caught her eye.
Jenn Mann’s high-concept work explores identity, critiquing how we “sell” ourselves in today’s consumerist society.
The Artist: Jen Mann’s body of work explores the self and our obsession with how we present ourselves to the world. While the self-portrait has been a mainstay in art since the dawn of time and has evolved over the years (think Egyptian wall paintings to Rembrandt to Warhol), Jen’s interest lies in how we brand ourselves — a consumerist approach to both expressing ourselves and relating to other people. Her work is clever and multifaceted, including photography, painting, music video and sculpture. She draws viewers in with slick, beautiful surfaces and then surprises them with something deeper and darker in the underlayers.
The Works: The paintings themselves are beautiful and mostly self-portraiture. She paints
in a hyperrealist manner, starting with photography, then working off the photos to achieve the desired effect in paint. Color becomes a means of disrupting the realism: “Using color in the work takes it out of the everyday,” says Jen. “It’s now an unreal place, and using crazy colors helps people look at an image and see that it’s not part of the real world.”
Vitruvian Woman (2022)
Jen’s latest body of work is all-encompassing and conceptual, and it’s incredibly indicative of the way this artist’s mind works. With her two best friends she formed a fake band, Other Sister, and spent three years creating work for it. She wrote 18 songs, directed and starred in accompanying music videos, photographed and painted fictional magazine covers, designed fictional glossy ads and recreated famous paintings like The Vitruvian Man (pictured) with her image in them. These works are at once playful and serious, ridiculous and cynical.
Other Sister – Rolling Stone Cover (2022)
Other Sister – Rolling Stone Cover (pictured) exemplifies many of the ideas she’s working through: the arrogance of putting oneself on a magazine cover, the saturated colors to illustrate the fakeness of it all, and the notion of how we present ourselves for sale to the world. Ultimately, the works are fun and playful while exploring the ways in which we as a society understand ourselves and how we relate to one another. It’s a critique, no doubt, but also a means of trying to figure out how culture impacts our identity.
Gucci Bunny (2022)
Take Gucci Bunny, for example. Here, Jen poses with her “bandmates” in an ad for one of the biggest luxury fashion brands today. On one hand, it’s funny that she’s egotistically saying her band deserves to be represented by Gucci itself. On the other hand, it’s an illumination of our society’s priorities — that we should even care who’s in the ad at all. The notion of being ruled by marketing ploys is bizarre.
Girl with a Pearl Earring (2022)
What Jen finds fascinating is the construction of identity, and how identity is formed by culture. We’re often so fanatical about consumerism that we look at ourselves through a corporate lens, constantly trying to brand ourselves to sell. “Within capitalism, you should buy, you should sell, you should be for sale,” says Jen. “And then we have social media, which is all about self. How do we sell ourselves, and how do we create a brand out of ourselves?” In this exhibition, Jen did just that. It was so convincing that the fact the band was fake came as a shock. Her point is to demonstrate how thin the line between fact and fiction can be, and to explore the push-pull feeling of constantly trying to determine what is real and what is not.
Jen received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design University and has gone on to show extensively across Canada, as well as in New York and San Francisco. She recently had a major exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art in Toronto. She’s a two-time recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant, amongst other awards. The paintings in her most recent exhibition started at $10,000, with “band” merchandise priced from $15.
Jen is represented by Gallery Jones in Vancouver. Having just completed a large body of work, she’ll be starting a new one soon, with exhibition details to be announced. The works from Other Sister are available for sale through Arsenal Contemporary Art.
Diana Hamm of WK ART is a Toronto art adviser. A graduate of Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, U.K., Diana focuses on contemporary art and discovering emerging artists. She also advises private clients on acquisitions and collection-building. Find out more at wkart.ca.