Jenny Brillhart

Jenny Brillhart’s artistic work consistently involves the interactions of light and shadow, depth and surface, structure and color. The material interplay of painting, photography, and sculptural elements form the basis for Brillhart’s approach to her surroundings and her everyday life. In particular, overlooked, mundane, yet deeply familiar objects and spaces serve as the central motif.

Her current exhibition invites viewers to dive into the realm of the still life as landscape, similar to her earlier series Overcast and Saxony Hotel. The title of this exhibition, Where the rubber meets the road, is connected to the artist’s background. In a figurative sense, the American proverb can be understood as a critical moment, as what’s essentially important in life, the potential. At the same time, the title is a reference to the place where the artist lives. Burning rubber in attempts to make long and very visible tire tracks is not an uncommon craft in rural Maine.

The moment when the tire moves on the pavement, marks the potential for process, movement and choice. The seam where two planes meet, like wall and floor or land and sky represent this occasion for opportunity in many of these works. Brillhart’s large-format oil paintings are often the result of carefully planned arrangements of found and made materials, which she constructs on walls and floors of her studio. Place, gravity, and time (moving and still) play a role. As do light, shadow, depth, surface, perspective, and value. Through these elements, ideas about object function, display and beauty are suggested. These threads run throughout her entire body of work.

Jenny Brillhart was born in 1972 in Keene, NH. She studied painting and drawing at Smith College and graduated with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She then moved to Miami, Florida, where she taught drawing and painting, at Art Center South Florida, University of Miami and the New World School of the Arts. Her work has been presented throughout the US and internationally in exhibitions at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Anhaltinische Gemäldegalerie Dessau, the Naples Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, among others. She lives and works in Miami, Florida and Stonington, Maine.