Working in video and installation-based performance, Jennifer Locke composes physically intense actions in relation to the camera and specific architecture, in order to explore the unstable nature of artist/model/camera/audience hierarchies. Her actions focus on cycles of physicality and visibility, and draw from her experiences as a professional dominatrix, champion submission wrestler, and artists’ model. Locke often creates a separation between her live actions and the audience through the use of material barriers, live video feeds, multiple camera perspectives, wireless microphones, and mini-cameras. These audio-visual reiterations produce a ripple effect, flattening, repeating, echoing, amplifying, and displacing the action by turning it —as well as the audience performing its own spectatorship— into an image of itself. Locke has exhibited in venues such as the 48th Venice Biennale; Air de Paris, Paris; the 9th Havana Biennial; the Basel Art Fair, Kunsthalle, Basel; La Panaderia, Mexico City; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Canada, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. She has curated for Artists’ Television Access and Queens Nails Annex, co-produced a cable access show, sung in punk bands, and given a variety of workshops. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded the 2006 Chauncey McKeever Award. Locke is currently an adjunct professor at St. Mary’s College of California and she also teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives and works in San Francisco. |