Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #1, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #2, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #5, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #11, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #12, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #14, 2021. Gelatin silver print, 50 x 40 inches.
Yancey Richardson is proud to present Self-Portraits While Buried, an exhibition featuring works from Jenny Calivas’ titular series and the artist’s debut with the gallery. Combining photography and performance, Calivas produces her photographs using analog processes and experimental darkroom techniques, prioritizing embodied ways of thinking and making. In photographs which show her partially or almost completely submerged in the landscape, Calivas explores the relationship between the female body and a feminized understanding of the Earth, while also reflecting on the power of looking and the vulnerability of being looked at.
Calivas began the Self-Portraits While Buried series in 2019, when she returned to her home state of Maine and the coastal region in which she grew up. After setting up her 4x5 inch camera, composing her desired frame and then proceeding to submerge herself underneath soil, sand, mud and grass, Calivas relinquished ultimate control over the image by relying upon instinct rather than sight to determine when to release the shutter. Though parts of her body remain visible—if only in a fragmented way—at times Calivas appears almost entirely absent as well, with only her hand and the shutter release cable left visible, thus challenging the notion of what a self-portrait might be.
These photographs substitute a momentary configuration of the earth for the experience of interiority so often provided by portraiture and, in Calivas’ case, for the social conventions and expectations that accompany the representation of feminine bodies. With her own body largely hidden, obscured and at times even transformed by the earth, Calivas presents a new understanding of how to relate to a landscape no longer framed by gender or the presumption of ownership.
Calivas received her MFA degree from Yale University and her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College. Her work is currently included in Shifting Landscapes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and has been exhibited at Light Work, Syracuse, NY; David Zwirner in New York and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME. Recent publications that feature her work include Aperture Magazine (Fall 2024) and an artist publication released by New Poetics of Labor (2023). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
