Miniature awakenings

A miniature bathtub is lit from above, sitting on a low, tiled table in a dark room. The light and the sound of water splashing draw you towards the object, and as you approach it, you see the projected image of a woman bathing. At first, the bathtub is filled with water that is eerily tinted red. The nude figure slowly begins caressing herself. The movements of the woman, though fluid, seem apprehensive and tentative. Her hands approach her pubic area but seem too shy to explore further, as though she is afraid of what she might discover. A few minutes go by and the redness of the water condenses and apparently flows into the woman through her vagina. Thus fortified and empowered, she climbs out of the bathtub leaving the water clear, and walks out of the projection. The illusion of the image projected into the miniature tub and the accompanying sound are so convincing that when the woman stands, you expect to be greeted by not a real woman, but a real holographic apparition. You realize you’ve been teased with the idea of what is “real.” But most of all, Amy Jenkins’s video installation Ebb(1996) leaves you uncomfortably remembering how it felt to begin to discover your own body.

Trained as photographer, Jenkins began using video as a static element in her photographs in 1990 in a body of work called the Teleroticseries. In many of these dark images, a television screen cast dim light on one or two naked human forms. The photographs juxtaposed a video screen image—often of an eye—with partial bodies engaged in vague acts, not explicit but unmistakably intimate. In this work she spoke to the increasing conflation of private and public and our individual and societal fantasies about being watched.

In a shift toward more subtle and multifaceted imagery, Jenkins eventually replaced human images in her photographs with those of emblematic objects and toys. In the complex worlds represented in her Fairytaleseries (1991–94) she combined groups of objects in pattern-saturated settings. Some of the featured objects she had saved from her childhood and some she had collected through the years, but all were charged with mystical or fairy tale associations. These items were set up in still life tableaux, their environments manipulated and collaged with video image backgrounds often appropriated from art history. The juxtaposition of the symbolically charged objects, the pattern of fabric on which they sat, and the video screen backdrops, referenced distinctions between mechanical and organic, hand manipulated and computer generated. Along with the complicated personal symbolism and art historical iconography of this series, it sought to address the subject of intimate relationships and gender roles through metaphoric explorations of truth, fiction, and myth.

Foreshadowing Jenkins’s more recent interest in video installation and projection, the rich, dramatic colors and crisp yet eerie light in her photographic work seemed to reference film and television as much as her iconography addressed art history. If Jenkins’s photographic images look as though they might spring from the same creative mind as the visual worlds of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, or The X-Files, it is perhaps because David Lynch and Chris Carter, like Jenkins, have borrowed heavily from the same classical sources: Renaissance Dutch and Venetian painting.

In the past few years, Jenkins’s work has exploded into three dimensions while retaining the miniature and fantasy elements of her photography. Using physical objects in actual space, she places video monitors within crafted environments or projects video images onto found or created objects. Jenkins’s work is rare in that it uses video, normally a medium of distance, not only to create work that is about intimacy, but to create work that is intimate itself. Foregoing some of the remoteness and theatricality that video can afford, Jenkins exclusively uses her own nude body and that of her lover as canvases, backdrops, and models. Because of the intimate anonymity of the images, viewers are able to project themselves into the work, discovering something about themselves rather...