Bio

Jennifer Trask attended Massachusetts College of Art completing her BFA in Metalsmithing in 1993 and later graduated the State University of NY at New Paltz with an MFA in 1997.  She now resides in Nevada at Lake Tahoe where she is a full time studio artist.

Examples of Trask’s work can be found in many public collections including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Art and Design in New York, NY; CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia. In 2011 Trask was named Sculpture Fellow by the New York Foundation for the the Arts.
Trask’s work has been cited in many international books and periodicals including W, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, Modern magazine, the Lark Books series, Metalsmith Magazine, American Craft and The Sunday Boston Globe Arts section, among others.

Statement

Embodiment

What do we carry with us in our bones? Literally, and metaphorically?

Neither clearly baneful nor benign, this work is intended to mirror our complex relationship to our own nature(s), and the peculiar concept of separateness, of dominion, over Nature.

As the ultimate expression of both physical sensation and emotional sentiment,(eg.: "I feel it in my bones") bone is the absolute reductive essence of both life, and death. Initially made of living cells, evolving, incorporating evidence of how we lived, the material itself embodies a latent narrative. 

The wearable pieces combine found materials, delicately carved florals with rough fragments of skull, teeth or antler forming an uneasy ornamental idiom. This aggregate of visceral and intellectual, raw and refined, drapes the shoulders, in nearly direct contact with the collarbones of the wearer. The re-appropriated floral motifs seem an incongruous remembrance, a grasping at permanence in a material that reinforces the reality of impermanence.