photo: Mana Kaasik
BIOGRAPHY
Katarina Jerinic makes work about the landscape on streets and sidewalks. 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
Streets and sidewalks are my natural setting and as I walk and look and think there, my work begins. 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 scientific ways we study the landscape–like geography, astronomy, geology, and botany.
I reframe my ordinary surroundings with photographs, drawings, prints and ephemera and let the things I encounter and reconsider 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 call attention to the overlooked. Other times I insert them back into public places to subtly point out what is 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? My projects offer ways to notice and reorient those tangible places and connect to imaginative possibilities.