ARTIST PROFILE

Michelle C Jaffe

  • United States (b. 1958 in Melbourne, florida)
  • Currently in New York, United States.
  • I create immersive participatory installations that interweave sculpture, sound & video. These environments initiate a fecund opportunity to explore the mythos of the collective, gender politics, & how individual psychology & pathology impact society.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a cross disciplinary artist. I create immersive participatory installations that interweave sculpture, sound & video. I choose materials for their specific ability to convey the concept. Each medium amplifies the other. Viewers become participants. Their active engagement animates & completes the work, as they forge their own interpretations.

Since 2000, my work has engaged with & incorporated armor, culminating in Wappen Field. My current work Neural: Cleave & Neural: Soul Junk focuses on the raw emotions, power & intent conveyed & betrayed by the human voice & facial expression. I probe sound as a dimensional volume full of association & memory, invoking pre-cognitive states of mind.  These environments initiate a fecund opportunity to examine the mythos of the collective, gender politics, & how individual psychology & pathology steer society.












BIOGRAPHY

I was educated in London as a teenager & received my BA Honours from University of East Anglia in England. Childhood exposure to Asian scrolls shaped my visual sensibility. Their depictions of space & balance, their unique evocation of so much with such economy, informed my work’s formal clarity & restrained reserve.

My work has been exhibited at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine, Bosi Contemporary, NY, Transylvania University & UICA in Michigan. Additional solo exhibitions: Wald & Po Kim Art Foundation, Susan Berko-Conde Gallery, Brooklyn College, Harvestworks Digital Media & Broadway Gallery in NY. I have created site-specific installations in Long Island City, NY & Djerassi, CA.

Since 2008, I am a fiscally sponsored artist of the New York Foundation for the Arts, awarded grants from New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, & am the recipient of residencies at MacDowell Colony & Djerassi. My artworks are in private collections & numerous design works are in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fashion Institute of Technology & Museé de la Mode et du Costume in Paris.


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