- reverse signed: Jeffrey Jenkins 1989 - untitled (unite series)

- Paper label also with the above description from Stux Gallery, Broadway, New York

- Overall dimensions: 25” wide x 21” high

Jeffrey Jenkins’ works, which employ materials such as sod, fur, and dried grass for their grounds, resemble specimens in natural history museums. In Screen (all works, 1989), for instance, wire grids laid over the natural materials recall both scientific diagrams and maps. But Jenkins’ compositions do not describe any scientific finding. Rather, the dusty, decrepit aura of the work conveys a nostalgia for obsolete systems, an attraction to the charm of old-fashioned faith. The works adopt the formal strategies of minimalism, but their suggestive titles (Burrow, Bound) and symbolically charged materials—earth as the ground we walk on and in which we are buried, fur as a source of warmth taken from animals, the suggestions of barrenness and death in the crusted sod and dried grass—lend a psychological dimension that Minimalism sought to eradicate. Jenkins’ materials recall earth art, but their relatively diminutive scale and the frames designating their status as art run contrary to earth art’s antiobject, antigallery stance.

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JEFFREY JENKINS