Working in performance, video, installation, and still imagery, Jennifer Locke composes physically intense, sculptural actions in relation to the camera, audience, and specific architecture. Within this framework, she plays with viewing structures—redistributing hierarchies between artist, model, camera, and audience—in order to explore intersubjectivity, spectatorship, and the construction of meaning. Her actions focus on cycles of duration, physicality, and visibility, and draw from her experiences as a dominatrix, wrestler, and artists’ model.

Locke often creates a separation between the action 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 a representation of itself.

Locke has exhibited in venues such as the 2010 California Biennial; 48th Venice Biennale; Air de Paris, Paris; the 9th Havana Biennial; the Basel Art Fair; La Panaderia, Mexico City; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Canada, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  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. Locke received the 2006 Chauncey McKeever Award, a 2010 Goldie, and a 2012 Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship. She lives and works in San Francisco.