photo: Mana Kaasik
BIOGRAPHY
Katarina Jerinic makes photographs, maps and ephemera about built landscapes and the past, present and possible of particular places. Her solo exhibitions and projects include SPACES, Cleveland, OH; Baxter St at CCNY, New York; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at University of Nevada Las Vegas; and a public project along the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, NY supported by NYC Department of Transportation Art Program and community partners. Her work has been included in exhibitions at PS122 Gallery, New York; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Queens Museum, NY; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY; and other institutions and galleries nationally. Her projects have been supported by Puffin Foundation, Teaneck, NJ; Times Square Alliance, New York, NY; Brooklyn Arts Council, NY and chashama, New York, NY. Residencies include Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; SPACES, Cleveland, OH; Baxter St at Camera Club of New York, NY; Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY; and MacDowell, Peterborough, NH. Her work has been discussed in Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, Washington City Paper, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and more. Jerinic has an MFA in Photography and Related Media from School of Visual Arts and a BA in History from American University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is based in observations made while walking and thinking about the landscape I encounter on streets and sidewalks. What has happened here? What is happening? What could happen instead? I approach the built environment with curiosity, humor, and awe, making connections between things found there and ways we study the natural landscape–like astronomy, geology, and botany.
I reframe my ordinary surroundings with photographs, drawings, prints and ephemera and let the particular content of an inquiry determine the form of the work. I’m interested in meanings implicit in different media. A photograph is a record of what once was here. A map is a drawing of how we prioritize a landscape. A municipal sign or landmark points out something we shouldn’t miss. Printed material evokes mass production and communication. I intervene in their everyday, expected functions in order to have a conversation with you, in a specific time, about a specific place. Sometimes I present the resulting objects in exhibition spaces to make the familiar strange. Other times I insert them back into public places to subtly point out what is overlooked and almost invisible. Each investigation forms a single project, responding to, resembling, and rearranging the world around it.
How weird is it that we organize and use the spaces around us as we do? All of us are participants in overlapping worlds that seem increasingly disconnected from shared realities, tangible experiences, and imaginative possibilities. My projects offer ways to notice and reorient those places.