Jenna Pirello: Shapeshifters
April 22nd - May 21
Jenna Pirello - Shapeshifters
Jenna Pirello’s latest body of work, “Shapeshifters,” is a continuation of her signature process-based style, re-emerging here as a more gestural and more figurative body of work. Distinct forms populate the densely layered color fields, referencing cut flowers, lush landscapes, domestic moments, the moon, and the artist’s cat, Millie. In depicting these familiar forms, Pirello draws with a fast hand and extracts lines, repeats shapes, shifts scale, and overall collapses the image to represent the ways moments are experienced by the artist, filtered through a noisy brain with a constant flow of interrupting information.
“It’s not about sense, it’s about sensation,” declares Pirello. Her process is reactionary, a deeply engaged game of call and response between mark, color, and form. She describes working into older paintings as having the juiciest results: “I like to start with already having a lot of information to respond to. I think of working into older paintings as approaching a frozen river that I can carve back into, cracking it open to commingle new ideas with the already existing flow of information in the painting underneath.”
Jenna Pirello currently lives and works in Portland, ME. She received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2014 and her BFA from Boston University in 2011. She was recently awarded a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA in 2018. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout Boston, MA and Portland, ME. In addition to a feature in ArtMaze Magazine in 2018, Pirello was highlighted in the 2019 Northeast Edition of New American Paintings, a critically acclaimed juried exhibition and periodical dedicated to presenting work by new artistic talent.
Shapeshifters will be Moss Galleries’ first exhibition in partnership with Fairchain, a tech start-up that ensures that artists will see royalties from future sales of their artwork on the secondary market. “There has been exponential growth in the secondary market, but artists have largely been left behind, even though they are essential to it,” Max Kendrick, one of the founders, told the New York Times. “How do we create a more sustainable model for the artist and the galleries that support them?”
Fairchain seeks to fundamentally change the way the art world works and specifically how it treats artists and their livelihoods.
