OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

It's Just For Fun, 2017. Oil on panel.

JENNIE OTTINGER's paintings explore power dynamics, hive mind and social belonging. Uniforms—both official and casual—indicate group belonging, while the faces of her figures point to the complex emotional experience that belonging entails. Their expressions range from stunned to disgusted, pleased to anxious, dumbly triumphant to horrified and grotesque. After earning a BA (1994) at University of the Pacific and a BFA (2000) at California College of the Arts, Jennie went on to earn her MFA at Mills College in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include Spoilers (2016) at Conduit Gallery (Dallas, Texas) and Letters to the Predator (2015) at Johansson Projects (Oakland, California). Rabble Rousers (2017), a two-person show with Megan Reed, closed recently at Johansson Projects. Jennie is a 2017-18 Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, which will host an Open House on October 15, 2017 (12-5). She lives and works in San Francisco, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What are the major themes in your paintings of cheerleaders, clubs and secret societies?

Jennie Ottinger: I’m interested in that complexity and ambiguity of power dynamics. Each of us expresses power in the ways available to us and I try to depict some of these in my paintings. I’m also interested in the role clubs and organizations play in our society. We develop rituals and indicators to signify belonging. Where do we each belong and what is expected of us?

Whoooo!, 2017. Oil on canvas

OPP: The faces are all pretty equally grotesque. At some moments, these figures and the power dynamics they seem to stand for, are horrifying and I feel Schadenfreude at their suffering. Then, a second later, I feel pity and sadness for those cheerleaders and bros in neckties cause they are so desperate and trying so hard. Tell us why you paint the faces the way you do.

JO: I’m glad you experience that fluidity of reaction to the subjects. I love the variety of human faces and even though the ones I paint all look the same in a lot of ways, it demonstrates how with the slightest differences, people look different and expressions change. And when there is so much similar, you do notice the small differences between individuals. I guess it addresses that intersection of individuals and groups which is always on my mind.

I use uniforms (both formal—cheerleaders and causal—preppy) as short hand to signal a certain type. I like to play with the baggage that those preconceptions bring to the story. Preppy boys mean different things to different people, and it might be very different than how you feel about that one preppy boy you know personally. It’s like that “some of my best friends are (fill in the blank)” phenomenon.  We can separate how we feel about a whole group from how we feel about one member of that group.

Are You Buying What We're Selling?, 2013.

OPP: Are you laughing at or empathizing with the figures you paint?

JO: Maybe a little of both. I use humor as a way to talk about issues I’m interested in. I present them as if I’m laughing at them but try to leave hints that I take their situation seriously. This ambiguity again is why I’m so interested in cheerleaders and sororities. Both are considered frivolous in certain circles. But though there is a case that they are outdated, they both relied on the relative feminists of their times.

On the one hand cheerleaders traditionally exists for the benefit of men—to help the men succeed in their endeavor—but cheerleaders have evolved to be mostly women and girls because at one time, only men and boys could participate in sports. Before Title IX, there wasn’t much girls could do in the way of extracurricular sports, so they flocked to cheerleading. It has further evolved into something that stands on its own. Cheerleaders are amazing and tough athletes who are not valued as much as they should be in the culture—or would be if they were men, I suspect. In fact, pop culture narrows them down to a few different types creating an almost virgin/whore dichotomy of the mean girl or the wholesome over-achiever.

Full disclosure, I tried out for my freshman cheerleading team but didn’t make it. I think you should know that. I was, however, in a sorority and although I do totally understand the criticisms of sororities, women started them because they weren’t allowed into the secret organizations that men were members of. After three years as a member, I still don’t understand exactly why they exist, but if fraternities exist, it seems feminist to start a club for women. And, for what it’s worth, I loved my time there.

Trustfall Among Taxidermy, 2015.

OPP: Many of your recent paintings refer to fictional stories, both novels and movies. What's your relationship to stories in general?

JO: I love books and almost always read fiction. A while ago I started to panic because there were so many books I wanted to read, but I felt like I would never get to them. So I started Read the Classics, a series where I painted new covers for books that were considered classics or modern classics and wrote summaries so that if you didn’t have the time or attention span for say Moby Dick, you could just read my summaries. They won’t get you through even a middle school class but they will get you through a cocktail party conversation. Which also ties into the themes of being in the club or not.

I learned a lot from this project (which is ongoing as I still do commissions of these). As you can guess, whenever you look at the western cannon of anything, it is obvious how white it is and to a lesser degree how male dominated the list is. It led me to seek out classics by women and people of color, and I read several amazing books I wouldn’t have gotten to. It also made me notice the way women were portrayed and their ultimate fates in the novels by men over the centuries.

Spoiler: He’s Already Married (Scene from Jane Eyre), 2016. Oil on panel. 16 × 20 in.

There Must Be a Clover in the Atmosphere (Scene from Bring It On), 2016. Oil on panel. 18 × 14 in

OPP: What do texts like Bring it On have in common with Jane Austen, Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre?

JO: I love Bring It On because it is dealing with serious issues in the guise of a silly cheerleading movie. It doesn’t try too hard to broadcast that it is dealing with profound social issues like cultural appropriation, race and feminism. Jane Austen is similar in the way that she is interested in class and feminism but conceals these issues in a pretty, pleasant, intimate story. It’s interesting to me when something seems frivolous, but you discover it’s actually profound instead of just assuming something’s profound because that’s the way it’s presented.

I also see Bring It On as one of the very few films that presents cheerleaders as actual human beings. Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre, as different as they are from Bring It On's Torrance and from each other, were all treated a certain way because of who people thought they were from surface judgements. As I was saying in the earlier answer, I like to use stereotypes to challenge the viewer to reassess what biases come up for them. It might be easier to admit to ourselves that we're a little dismissive of cheerleaders than it is to admit we might also be a little dismissive of a marginalized group in society.

OPP: What are you working on right now in your studio? Any new directions?

JO: I’m still working on cheerleading and sororities. I’m planning on sewing some cheerleader uniforms and want to include a performative element mainly so people will have to let me do their hair and makeup.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What early influences have impacted your community-engaged public art projects?

Maria Gaspar: I was greatly impacted by the work of local artists who engaged young people and residents in a creative process of art-making. In Chicago's mural movement, artists and community folks worked together to represent positive images of their neighborhoods. Spaces like bodega corner stores and community buildings became visual sites for dialogue and civil rights. I understand this work as not only having symbolic power, but also political, social and cultural reverberation. This approach continues to influence my way of translating issues around displacement, contested spaces and the politicized body. 

OPP: Tell us about the public interventions of City As Site.

MG: City As Site was very intentionally located on the West Side of Chicago, where I could examine the spatial subtleties around landscape and power with young people within the Lawndale communities. Young people are constantly negotiating their social behaviors within the often-authoritative and oppressive realities of so-called public space and a growing hyper-surveillance normalcy, especially towards brown and black communities. Through City As Site, we created performance interventions with our bodies; mediated vacant lots by way of temporary installations; invented new stories around an isolated viaduct, inserting performance art into the architecture of a bleak space; created drawings on sidewalks using found street detritus; and staged comedic tableaus at the local public park.The most compelling experiences occurred during our daily collective walks as we interacted with architecture through improvisation, where youth made beautiful, poetic, and powerful gestures. At the same time, we also faced misperceptions around our collective walking. What we considered to be a positive and imaginative set of dérives through the city was interpreted as threatening to some strangers. Walking with youth of color became a radical, political act. 

City As Site led to my thinking around specific contested spaces in the Little Village community. In my ongoing conversations with other artists and activists in the area, we speculated about potential art pieces on the jail wall. In 2012, that speculative conversation turned into meetings with community stakeholders, including the Sheriff's Department, and that led to 96 Acres.

OPP: What’s been most challenging about 96 Acres?

MG: The jail is the largest architecture of my community and grappling with what that means on the social and political level is difficult to say the least. The project begets questions around impacted communities of color, the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and works closely with transformative justice approaches. Its complexity is also in its diversity of voices, including an organized 96 Acres Steering Committee and 96 Acres Education Initiative, all facets of 96 Acres that grew out of an organic conversation around the needs of the project. It includes artistic contributions from many other artists and activists around the city and beyond that creatively intervene in the Cook County Jail site using art that engages its surrounding communities. 

OPP: How does your more traditional studio practice influence the community-based work?

MG: My collective projects are durational and community-specific, which entails a lot of time and sensitivity to the conversations that surface through a very thoughtful and open set of questions. This is very different from my individual work where the durational element is in a space of solitude. That space allows me to not only make installations or objects, but also reflect and identify new questions for my work and contend with them. As someone interested in community engagement, the process through which radical community ideas emerge is the most powerful element to this work. I’m influenced Augusto Boal's Games For Actors and Non-Actors and its improvisational methodologies—performance, the body and translation intricately negotiate the gesture, personal and political histories, collaboration and participation. To me, the power lies in the orchestration of situations that create a range of provocative images, interrogate language, and generate innovative ideas. And ultimately, that the spaces I create with others are also spaces for freedom—to be, or to become—fluid spaces of reimagining.

OPP: Tell us about your ongoing exploration of the color brown. What does brown mean to you, formally and symbolically, and how have your explorations of it changed over the last few years?

MG: The color brown is persistent in much of my work. Originally, I was interested in the way that Chicago's Graffiti Blaster program removed graffiti by covering it in brown paint. All along my neighborhood, I saw patches of small and large brown areas that obscured signs, words or images along viaducts or buildings. The color brown was meant to cover the signs and assimilate into the architectural landscape, but instead the brown color became more visible and the small patches turned into entire sides of buildings. Along with the color, the gesture of "blasting" brown was an interesting act to me. So, I decided to do the same action in an installation at 6018 North, where I spray gunned an entire room brown—ceiling to floor. This action was meant to amplify brownness as an act of power. It was about dislocation and belonging and asserting a brown space into what is traditionally a white gallery or exhibition space. In my series of "brown outs," I've completed a series of shadowy forms that conceal and reveal themselves within interiors of buildings. The forms demarcate space and territory and rouse issues of proximity and subjectivity.

OPP: I was particularly struck by the documentation of Oblation for Another Parade Performance (2009) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was sad and powerful to watch how few people even noticed the slow-moving group of people of color. The symbolic social and political implications about visibility and space are clear, especially in the context of MCA's First Fridays. I also ended up thinking a lot about how human beings have different capacities for spatial awareness. In crowds, there are patterns of behavior for claiming and asserting space, which may be culturally conditioned. Some people weave in and out, predicting movements of other people, while others simply plant themselves or barrel ahead, oblivious to the bodies of other people. Was there anything really surprising to you about the crowd's response or lack of response to the performance while it was happening?

MG: So much of my artistic practice has used interventionist strategies within public or private spaces. I am often examining the ways that spaces elicit a certain kind of behavior, such as within the confines of a museum. My inclination is to subvert it. I wasn't completely surprised at some of the lack of acknowledgement at the MCA because it was during the First Friday's event, which is like a museum-turned-nightclub. Most people were interested in the socializing aspect of the event, which is exactly why I wanted to create a performance that punctured that environment. The performers made a kind of shape shifting architecture that necessitated an alternate pathway. I was more interested in the ways that people were redirected around the performers and the power that the performers attained as they moved through the first floor of the museum. In addition, the performers were a mix of people, such as modern dancers, a former student who performs in professional drag shows across the city, as well as my community of friends and colleagues who were not experienced performance artists, but enthusiastic and committed to exploring this idea with me. It was a great experience, overall.

OPP: In 2013, you produced a short, audio documentary called Cook County Jail: The Visible and the Invisible, which investigated what it means to live next to one of the largest pre-detention facilities in the country. On your website are images of proposals for a series of sound installations based on the proximity of a jail. Have these proposals become a reality yet? Will these sound installations make use of audio from The Visible and the Invisible or have you continued to interview Little Village residents about the jail?

MG: The proposals are meant to provoke a dialogue about who sees the jail and who doesn't and why/why not. The idea is to place three sound installations in three parts of a major street, 26th Street (same street as the Cook County Jail), and program them with interviews and personal stories about incarceration. A version of this proposal is currently in development. For now, the audio archive is growing. On the 96 Acres website, the public is invited to upload their personal stories. At an upcoming 96 Acres exhibition at the Hull House Museum (Fall 2015), we will set up a recording table for visitors interested in contributing a personal story. I recently began a residency at the Experimental Sound Studio where I am producing a new set of audio pieces that deal with the sonic landscape of the jail vicinity. I have been documenting the informal architectures of the jail periphery the past few years, which include photos and audio of cultural events located just outside the jail walls, including a recent carnival last week. Audio is a powerful medium that transcends boundaries and geographies and grants the listener the freedom to imagine a space, people and places.

OPP: In 2014 you won a Maker Grant, which is cosponsored by Chicago Artist Coalition and OtherPeoplesPixels, you were featured in the Chicago Tribune as Chicagoan of the Year in the Visual Arts in 2014, and you were just awarded a Creative Capital Award. How have these prestigious awards impacted both your practice and your career?

MG: Receiving these awards has been a tremendous honor, to say the least. Lori Waxman, who wrote about my work in the Tribune, is a person I greatly respect and admire. Her writing on my practice means a lot to me. The Maker Grant is special because it means that people in my own city have recognized my work as a Chicago artist. Whereas on a national level, Creative Capital has been supportive in funding my long-term art projects that are generally riskier and more challenging to fund. They are willing to take that long ride with me and are invested in all aspects of my creative life. This is an incredibly profound experience that is entirely new to me. I am very motivated by the opportunities and possibilities. I am also very grateful to my friends and, especially my family, that have been there for me every step of the way, and who have indeed been taking that life/art ride with me for a long time regardless of awards or recognition.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include solo shows I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) and Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, as well as Here|Now, a two-person exhibition curated by MK Meador and also featuring the work of Jason Uriah White, at Design Cloud in Chicago (2014). Most recently, Stacia created  When Things Fall Apart, a durational, collage installation in the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center. Closing reception guests were invited to help break down the piece by pulling pins out of the wall.