This fall the Hammer Museum presents artist Jamie Isenstein as part of its ongoing Hammer Projects exhibition series. She will also participate in the Hammer's Artist Residency Program which will allow her to conduct research and engage in a series of unannounced performances throughout Los Angeles and on the UCLA campus.
Jamie Isenstein uses her body as the raw material for many of her artistic interventions. She turns the inside out and occasionally anthropomorphizes familiar objects and scenarios in performance, installation, drawing, and sculpture.
For her Hammer Projects exhibition, Jamie Isenstein presents a project inspired by a story of deceit. At his American Museum (1841-1865), P.T. Barnum needed to keep the flow of visitors moving so he placed a sign over a side exit door that read, "This Way to the Egress." Spectators who did not know the meaning of the word 'egress' (a term meaning exit) followed the sign expecting to see some sort of exotic bird.
Instead they found themselves outside the museum and having to pay another entrance fee to get back in. Having been tricked, Barnum's Museum visitors' entire conception of what they just saw must have been thrown into question. Isenstein explores how this "self-reflexive moment of looking and understanding the artifice of display" by taking on the role of the imaginary bird. A banner painted in the style of an old sideshow tent introduces the piece, and inside the gallery several objects add another layer to this confusion. "Jamie's work recontextualizes the familiar so we see the world around us in a new light" said Ali Subotnick, the exhibition's curator. "Her art is incredibly witty and smart; who would think to do a ventriloquist show with a (her) skeleton? It's totally absurd but it makes so much sense."
Hammer Projects: Jamie Isenstein is presented through a residency at the Hammer Museum. The Hammer Museum's Artist Residency Program was initiated with funding from the Nimoy Foundation and is supported through a significant grant from The James Irvine Foundation. The Hammer Projects exhibition series is made possible with support from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, Fox Entertainment Group's Arts Development Fee, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, members of the Hammer Circle, and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel Fund.
Jamie Isenstein lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University, New York (2004) and her BA from Reed College, Portland (1998). She has been included in shows at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Performa 05 Biennial in New York and Small A Projects in Portland. She has had solo exhibitions at Andrew Kreps Gallery and Guild & Greyshkul in New York and Galerie Giti Nourbaksch in Berlin along with Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has been awarded an Agnes Martin Fellowship Award (2003) and an Arthur B. Davis Foundation Research Grant (1997-1998). -- www.hammer.ucla.edu
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