Jova Lynne: Soft Thrones
October 1 – October 31, 2020
Jova Lynne:
Soft Thrones
October 1 – October 31, 2020
Matéria in collaboration with Eugenie, is pleased to present the month of October window installation The Empress by Jova Lynne, part of the artist’s series Soft Thrones.
What does it mean to hold and sit with power?
To wield a weapon, a tool, a body. With power.
To subvert masculine weapon, tool and body. To create a new landscape of power.
A Soft Throne.
Soft Thrones is a series within the Sites of Power body of work produced by artist Jova Lynne.
In January 2018, the artist Jova Lynne traveled to her familial home of Kingston, Jamaica to collaborate on a series of workshops with queer identified-female spectrum Jamaicans. Workshop participants reflected on the ways in which one cultivates relationship to power and what it means to distill power through body and tool. These conversations as well as the artists own reflections on identity and family have informed the portraits and objects presented in Soft Thrones.
Ronnessia, Afifia, Isabel, Kerri, Tina soft unexplainable power. Upon their Soft Thrones.
JOVA LYNNE
Jova Lynne is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and curator based out of Detroit, MI of Jamaican and Colombian heritage, born and raised in New York City. Lynne graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA in 2010 with a Bachelors of Arts in Video Art and Education, and moved to Detroit in 2015 to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which she completed in May of 2017.
Lynne is a grantee of the Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, which has supported her work on media based projects in Kingston, Jamaica and Berlin, Germany, in addition to her work in Detroit.
Jova Lynne is interested in the parallels between fictional, historical and personal archive in identity development. In her practice Lynne seeks to subvert anthropological practice in utilizing the lens and performance. She is interested in the cognitive dissonance one experiences when navigating material, text and media-based archive. Lynne’s work has been presented at galleries and museums across the globe including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Torrance Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum and Stroboskop Art Space, Warsaw Poland.
While adapting to current health and safety guidelines, viewers can enjoy the art installation from the patio in front of Eugenie. Additional works by Jova Lynne are also on view at Simone DeSousa EDITION, next to Eugenie, for the entire month of October.