Chances, Choices, Chases by Jennie Ottinger

A new exhibition opening this week in London features paintings inspired by Jane Eyre:

Jennie Ottinger
Chances, Choices, Chases
Eleven Fine Art, London, UK

28th October to 3rd December 2011
Private view: 27th October, 6-8pm

Eleven is pleased to present Jennie Ottinger’s first UK exhibition in Chances, Choices, Chases whereshe has created paintings and abridged novels from classic literature. Despite the fast pace of life, thereremains an impulse to read classic books. With numerous forms of media constantly competing for ourattention, it is an overwhelming task to try to keep up with all the books, music, and movies that interestus. We are reminded of our own mortality as there is a finite amount of time in which to engage ourdesired experiences.

Ottinger creates a quick solution to digesting well known novels. Using the casual vernacular of ourmodern time, she summarises synopses of classic tales. Creating an even more succinct summary, theplot and character descriptions are stripped down to their bare essentials. Ottinger glues together thepages of hard cover classic novels, cuts out the centre of the blocks of pages and places her hand writtensynopses in the empty space. Reinterpreting the book covers but drawn in verisimilitude, the books canbe used for fooling those around you into believing you are engrossed by the novel in its entirety. Heradaptations of the stories allow the reader the pleasure of absorbing the main points of the novel in amere few minutes. The title of the exhibition Chances, Choices, Chases serve as categories to furtherreduce literary masterpieces to single words.

Presenting paintings of scenes from the classic tales she gives viewers a snap shot of the book’s contentswhere a few words and images suggest the infamous story lines. Like Grant Wood, she presents thecharacters more as archetypes than individuals, relying on costume, prop and setting cues for theiridentity. Similar to the loose unfinished qualities of Marlene Dumas’s paintings, Ottinger leaves muchto the viewer's own ability to fill in the blanks. This newest body of work sees her characters animatedand expressive, visually bringing to life stirring plot points from the novels along with the more subtlenarrative defining scenarios. We rely on her own dedication to reading the classics as she selects scenesfor her paintings which relate to significant moments in each story.

The tales she depicts are part of a collective cultural consciousness and have been adapted into movies,plays, and other forms of media. The viewer is drawn to the familiarity of characters, identifyingwith their personas and plight. Exploring the themes of chases, choices, and chances in the characterslives, Ottinger draws parallels to the critical crossroads in our own lives where we are forced to makedecisions and thereby live with the outcomes.

Jennie Ottinger was born in 1971 and lives and works in San Francisco. Her recent solo exhibitionsinclude Due By (2010), Johansson Projects, Oakland, USA and Due Process (2010), Kantor Gallery, LosAngeles, USA.

Jane Eyre is one of the classic tales explored (click in the pictures to enlarge them):

Jane Eyre, 2011 Gouache and graphite on paper (cover), summarised and hollowed book 9 x 6 in / 23 x 15 cm

Classroom (Scene from Jane Eyre), 2011 Gouache and graphite on paper mounted on panel 14 x 11 in / 36 x 28 cm

Meet My Better Half (Scene from Jane Eyre), 2011 Oil on panel 16 x 20 in / 41 x 51 cm

All images are courtesy of Eleven, London – www.elevenfineart.com
Thanks to Susannah Haworth for sending us this information.