Audrey Samsara
Amy Jenkins. Audrey Samsara, 2004.
Description:
"The Audrey Samsara" is a meditative, slowly unfolding film featuring the artist’s 18-month old daughter breastfeeding, falling asleep, reawakening, breastfeeding and again falling into deep sleep. This continual cycle brings to mind the notion of the life force, hence the Buddhist word “Samsara,” meaning the cycle of death and rebirth. Drawing inspiration from renaissance painting, "The Audrey Samsara" echoes depictions of the Madonna and Child, as well as the Pieta, yet it is not idealized nor sentimental. Intimate and edgy, it captures the truth of the nursing experience. "The Audrey Samsara" is a self-portrait of mother and daughter at it’s most minimal and essential: the irrevocable need for nourishment and rest.
Ironically, in May 2004, "The Audrey Samsara" was censored from its first scheduled public exhibition at the New York 5th Avenue gallery of designer Salvatore Ferragamo, when a company executive found the artwork "distasteful." Articles have been written about the artwork in Art Papers, the National Coalition Against Censorship newsletter, The NY Daily News, The Boston Globe, among others.
Link to view video on artist's website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/Audrey%20Samsara.html
Large-scale photographs, produced separately from the video, are also a part of The Audrey Samsara series. Link to view photographs:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/photography/cradle.html
Exhibitions of "The Audrey Samsara" include:
2010: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, Georgia;
2009: The Intimate Line, Sepia International Inc., New York, NY;
2009: Boob Tube, screening presented by Aurora Picture Show at Caroline Collective, Houston, Texas;
2006: Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel;
2005: Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, Vermont;
2005: Kustera Tilton Gallery, New York, New York;
2004: Samson Projects, Boston, Massachusetts
Medium:
Video
Tags:
self portrait, motherhood, mother, intimacy, pieta, breastfeeding, red shoes, infant, censored, nursing, madonna and child, Amy Jenkins
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