I would like to provide you with some insight into my work. I will first ask you to visualize a wooden box in the middle of my studio.

The wooden box has contained many things over the years including glass, bottles, steel, antique lantern slides, magnets, pins, maps, brass cut-outs, magnifying lenses, motors, ice, computer chips, microscopes, paper, bicycles, and a dictionary or two.

My imagination then suggested something to me. I was to suggest to you that the wooden box be stenciled with the word Soap.  This is no doubt based in my recollection of meditating as a young boy. I would find myself repeating the word Soap over and over again until it had lost all meaning. Soap was my Mantra.

Please invert the soapbox and place me on top of it. I stand surrounded by some of my recent works and perhaps there are some older ones as well. I don’t really control what shows up in the collection surrounding me, it’s your imagination at work. The fabrications all contain some parts formerly in the box but are not limited to having been inside the box. They are now outside of the box for your examination.

At this point I’m called upon to say something meaningful from the soapbox. Well here goes…

The fabrications are all well made. Traditional manufacturing methods are utilized to produce these works. These methods may be taken to an extreme to emphasize a very specific point of view. The fabrications may be unsettling as they appear to have little or no connection with what is familiar to you. They may move, record, balance, melt, distract and perhaps disorient.  All parts of the fabrications are intentionally selected.  Everything articulated to provide essentially an allegory. They are in fact hyper-anachronistic allegorical and metaphysical timepieces.

This may cause you to reflect as do some of the mirrors in my work, or it may not. You decide. There is no more time and space now for me on this page. The soapbox is removed. Your work is done for the moment, mine is not.

© J. Jenkins 2018