"The ideas that launch much of my work come from a deep personal space. However, sometimes I simply cannot help but expose the beautiful absurdity with the emotional, social, political, and sexual self. "
-Jennifer (Tova) Vasher
Jennifer Vasher's oeuvre includes sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. Vasher's deep and personal reflections on life and culture manifest from societal, political, and environmental concerns. "My message is to question things-that's what artists do-question the world around them. When I make art, it comes from a need to express what I see and feel, looking deep within and around at the human condition."
Please contact for larger images, additional inventory, and prices jennifervasher@gmail.com
"Her style is interdisciplinary, her media everything from paint and charcoal to the refuse of our consumerist culture. While she cites as influences, “material-based” artists like Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, books are her main inspirations. A voracious reader, her work does with sculpture, installations, and drawings what many of her literary icons such as Flannery O'Conner, Margaret Atwood, Arundhati Roy, and Naomi Klein, do on the page—that is, call things out. “Basically, I’m doing the things that make me go ahem,” she says, clearing her throat in that way that says bullshit. “But I keep Bill Moyers in mind,” she says, “and try to be comparative rather than declarative.”
As such, her work invites multiple interpretations, like the molded rubber “body condoms” from which nude bodies are either emerging or struggling to free themselves from suffocation or consumption; the steel “test tube” injected with gooey layers of motor oil, petroleum jelly, and liquid rubber; and the serene-yet-suffocating space of the installation Spa-alter.
Then there are the pills, millions of them, varnished to shine like little jewels in a number of works, including Entitlement: The Past Is Never Dead and Buried (Tylenol Room). Two years in the making and exhibited from 2008–2011 in galleries throughout the US and in Paris, the installation comprises more than 500,000 over-the-counter pain pills that Jennifer drilled and strung by hand into garlands hung curtain-like around a white chaise lounge. The space is both restful—just let go and take your medicine—and restive, an indictment of the over-medication of society, our insistence on a pill for every ill.
Power Pumps and Super Sprays: Weapons of the Anthropocene also bites. Exhibited at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque from August through September 2021, it features the familiar shapes of cleaning products and cosmetic containers turned into surreal vessels of what Jennifer calls the cult of cleanliness. With their candy colors and surfaces as airbrushed as the complexion of an Instagram influencer, they evince a humorous, sci-fi absurdity. But recalibrate your attention and they exude menace, medical instruments culling all that is unclean, never mind the damage to our mental and environmental health.
Although created long before COVID-19 hit, Jennifer is aware of how the work might also be interpreted post-pandemic, and she’s fine with that. “It’s okay to be provocative, it’s okay to question. That’s what artists do.” - BY RENA DISTASIO -Trend Magazine Art+Architecture+Design 2022
Contact for larger images, additional inventory, and prices jennifervasher@gmail.com