Jennifer Shenk

Many of the artists in this beautifully intimate exhibition curated by Dr. Rachel Epp Buller cross the boundaries of time. They are time travelers of a sort, seeking to open windows into the past to understand the lives of their fore-bearers, and their own, anew.

Jayne Holsinger, Selections from Nine Tetrameters, 1996. Oil on Canvas

Jane Holsinger, for example, frames her paintings in the four-patch quilt block pattern, a grid structure that is at once reminiscent of both domestic labor and modernist painting. Painting is a form of relationship between the artist and the subject; in this case it is a relationship characterized by a search for affinity with the hands of the women in the artist’s past.

Teresa Braun’s eerily beautiful video piece, accessible via screen and headphones in the exhibition space, also floats between multiple worlds. She combines performance, the body, film, and the digital to craft a family mythology that questions the autonomous boundaries of the individual. In The Plaint, the body is organism, architecture, and sustenance all at once, and the artist’s present identity is navigated through the characters of the past.

Gesine Janzen, “September 11, 1817,” 2015 (top). Etching. “The Color of Memory,” 2016 (bottom). Photopolymer intaglio print.

Gesine Janzen’s prints play with the role of remnants. What happens when we glimpse the gaze of our ancestors, frozen in a photograph, or their handwriting, lining the pages of a journal? The photograph is an object that by definition is a marker of loss (in the fact that when looking at a photograph one is never when/where the photograph is taken, and can never be then or there again.) Loss pervades Janzen’s work, in the woman who is no longer here and the message that can no longer be read.

The works of Jennifer Miller, Kandis Friesen, and Karen Reimer, on the other hand, carry strong admonitions, seeking to bring attention to our forms of complicity and ask us to question the narratives we have inherited.

Jennifer Miller, Crude, Powdered graphite, ink, acrylic on paper 2013.

Kandis Friesen, Onsa Japse Jeit Jantsied, 2015. Leather and thread.

In Miller’s case, she is implicated in her political criticism of the Keystone XL pipeline through the personal history of her family’s involvement with it. Tension becomes palpable in the green paint, actively oozing from the surface of Crude. In Friesen’s piece, a hand-sewn drawing on leather, it is the recognition of the colonial history that has been erased from many Mennonite narratives of trauma and migration, evident in the staunch pierced leather, a material that is a product of conquest.

Karen Reimer, Socialist Worker, March 31, 2000, 2000 (detail)

Rendering a copy of the Socialist Worker, March 31, 2000 through embroidery in her piece of the same title, Karen Reimer not only elicits questions about the notion of originality and authorship (i.e. who gets to take credit for the work of art?) but also calls the status of the very art object into question, flattening the mythology of the individual-artist-genius. Drawing on the rich history of activism and consciousness-raising associated with fiber arts, Reimer’s piece, like many in this exhibition, subtly probe the relationship between the past and the present, asking us to examine the hierarchies in our own systems of value.

Editor’s Note: While Anabaptist Historians generally focuses on historical research, in the interdisciplinary spirit of “Crossing the Line”, we are broadening our scope during this series to include a wide variety of Anabaptist studies.

See other writings on “Crossing the Line: Women of Anabaptist Traditions Encounter Borders and Boundaries” here.