Visit with Nefertiti Jenkins
Nefertiti Jenkins invites us inside her studio as she prepares for Ghosts in the Garden, her two-person exhibition at Uprise Art.
Nefertiti’s paintings depict the transformation of everyday items, such as a flask or flower, into anthropomorphic characters that coyly navigate the painting's built environment with mysterious motives.
In her painting Shrub Infusion, the artist plays on the double meaning of shrubs, as both a drink made with vinegared fruit and a diminutive wooded plant. The emerald shrubbery creeps from the background into the foreground, embracing the hand that clutches at a swirling solution. Throughout the image, there is a sense that no impermeable borders exist, that the shrubbery might infuse with the shrub and vice versa, the hand is only an apparition, the glass a molten boundary.
What if the plants and peripheral objects took the main stage over the figure? They hold the power, the personality, and become all-encompassing within the scene. Roles are switched and the figure fades into the background and is absorbed by what would normally be decorative elements.
Nefertiti Jenkins
In Another Earthy Sip, a glittering cordial is carefully drizzled onto the cropped stalk of a fledgling flower, while the spirit of its disemboweled bloom drifts nearby. In this work, Nefertiti imagines a flower being harvested and used to make the herbal tonic that is then used to water the cut stem. The exchange is somewhat ouroboric in nature, the plant sacrificing itself to make itself stronger.
In the painting Flower Master, sinuous ropes of verdant vine slither from the depths of a flower pot and onto the table, encircling a woman whose expression is partially concealed by a bulbous bloom. Is the woman the master of the flower or is the flower the master of the woman?
Throughout Nefertiti’s paintings, this ambiguous balance of power and agency is a recurring motif. Are the depicted elixirs life-giving, or live-taking? Is the garden a passive witness or an active battalion?
