Jennifer Zwick

Jennifer Zwick constructs narrative photographs that tell stories exploring fantastical childhood moments, focusing on bizarrely adventurous young girls, drawing from childhood desires, memories, and emotions. In her first solo show, I’m So Scared/It’s All So Hard, Jennifer aimed to convey and channel her anxiety/awkwardness through multimedia works. She has been exhibited at the SAM Gallery, Port Angeles Fine Art Center, and SOIL Art Gallery. Jennifer received her BFA in photography from the University of Washington. In 2013 she was featured in CityArts Magazine.

Jennifer received 2010 GAP Award funding to purchase new equipment so that the artist may return to studio/set-based narrative photography. Her first project will be a triadic split-view set, inspired by the murals of Diego Rivera and 17th-19th century Rajasthan Indian art. Jennifer will explore both these forms of artwork which feature multiple perspectives (flattened and forced) within a single frame allowing a scene to be viewed from several angles at once, both literally (in the case of the Indian art) and metaphorically (to flesh out the narrative).

Jennifer received 2007 GAP Award funding to purchase large-format camera equipment for the development of two bodies of work: Constructed Narrative and Visual Weight. Constructed Narrative focuses on young girls in dream-like situations mined from her own childhood and Visual Weight is based upon her experience as a security guard at the Frye Art Museum and deals with the deconstruction of installations.

As part of her Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, Jennifer gave a two-day workshop at Mount Vernon High School. The first day she presented a slideshow/talk on Constructed Narrative Photography, and showed examples from international and local artists from 1851-2010. After the talk the students broke into small groups and generated their own idea sketches for photographs. The second day they created the photographs. Jennifer reports, “The students were very excited about this project, and I was impressed by their quick planning—for a two-day project the results were fairly complex. Two of the students in the class are autistic and it was interesting to work with them to translate their ideas, which were very conceptual (how the imperfections of everyday moments influence our greater feelings) into something which could be physically photographed.”