Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Performance, video, installation, still imagery
Website: jenniferlocke.net
Jennifer Locke lives and works in San Francisco. She received both her BFA (1991) and her MFA (2006) from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she subsequently taught in the New Genres Department from 2009 to 2022, including a period as Interim Department Chair in 2020. She has also taught at California College of the Arts, St. Mary’s College, and as a guest at institutions including Stanford University, Mills College, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Pomona College.
Her awards include the Chauncey McKeever Award (2006), a Goldie Award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian (2010), a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2012), and a SECA Award nomination from SFMOMA (2007, 2010). Her work has been written about in Frieze, Flaunt, Art Practical, Hyperallergic, and Radical History Review.
Working in performance, video, installation, and still imagery, Locke composes physically intense, sculptural actions in relation to the camera, audience, and specific architecture. Within this framework she plays with viewing structures — redistributing hierarchies between artist, model, camera, and audience — in order to explore intersubjectivity, spectatorship, and the construction of meaning. Her actions focus on cycles of duration, physicality, and visibility, and draw from her experiences as a dominatrix, wrestler, and artists’ model. She often creates separation between action and audience through material barriers, live-video feeds, multiple camera perspectives, wireless microphones, and mini-cameras; these audio-visual reiterations produce a ripple effect, flattening and displacing the action by turning both it and the audience’s own spectatorship into representation.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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