Josie Jenkins : Assembled Worlds

5 Dec 2020-10 Jan 2021

Overview

For her solo exhibition at Bluecoat, Assembled Worlds Liverpool based artist Josie Jenkins presents a number of paintings which have been made in her studio at Arena Studios over the last three years, alongside more recent work made at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. Josie Jenkins uses large scale paintings to reimagine the world we live in. Her ‘exteriors’ borrow scenery from romantic painters like Thomas Cole, the American painter known for his epic landscape and history paintings. Jenkins pairs the foreboding grandeur of these landscapes with elements of the everyday, such as plastic barrier fencing and clusters of discarded furniture. Her canvases are layered with unruly objects that disobey context and scale. In one painting, Jenkins has blown children’s building blocks up to the scale of a neo-classical ruin and landed them onto a sprawling plain before a mountain range. Her ‘interiors’ take a similar approach to composition, creating an invented scene from borrowed objects and backdrops. Through painting, Jenkins is able to wrestle the chaotic world around her into some kind of order. She uses painting as a virtual space in which she can place things into the world, move them around, and play with scale. Jenkins’ solo show is part of a series of new fast changeover slots for artists from the Liverpool City Region, which both acknowledges their excellence and creates a showcase for art works that have yet to be exhibited in a public gallery. The faster pace of each exhibition also allows for a greater number of artists to be shown.