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Artist Statement:
A close connection with the
animal nature has helped me to
have more empathy with all
manifestations of the life
force, and to express the
complex experience of what it
is to be here as a flesh and
blood being.
As long as I can remember, I
have loved animals ...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
JAN HARRISON
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
5/2008 “The Sparky Show,”
SCHROEDER ROMERO / WINKLEMAN
Gallery Project Space, New
York, New York. (Curator:
Nelson Santos)
3/2008 “Women Working Outside
the Box,” BARRETT HOUSE CLAY
WORKS, Poughkeepsie, New York.
2/2008 “The Dream of The Red
Chamber Masquerade Ball,”
Invitational, WHITE BOX, New
...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
Jan Harrison
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
THE WEXNER CENTER FOR THE
VISUAL ARTS, Columbus, Ohio,
USA
SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART,
New Paltz, New York, USA
CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM,
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
ARCO CENTER FOR THE VISUAL
ARTS, Los Angeles, California,
USA
CINCINNATI BELL CORPORATION,
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
THE DAYTON ART INSTITUTE, ...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Jan Harrison:
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Essay by George Quasha. copyright 2001
Reading by George Quasha, 9/15/01
Kleinert/James Arts Center, Woodstock, New York
Crossing Over to Jan Harrison
One reason why we don't easily experience other dimensions is our fear of
meeting up with monstrous otherness. We fear fusion. We are careful about
who we let get into us, under our skin, lest we sew dark seed in our
imaginal garden. We the people spread our lobes for the palatable, the
desirable, the familiar, or else corralled wildness, the jungle zoos of
horror flicks and their amusement park frissons. Fearing possession we
prefer our genies/our genius bottled. Yet the truly exotic and the perilous
have their own attraction, threatening our sense of order, because actual
strangeness also belongs to the erotic. When the monstrous becomes
irresistible we fear the influence of devils, magic. Deep down we retain
knowledge contained in the word itself monster and mind have a common
Indo-European root, men- as in mental, memory, mania, mantic, muse, music, mantra.
A monstrance for Catholics is a receptacle of the Host. The sacred
is held at but a sleight remove from the aesthetics of sex with the devil
himself. Think of Milton's covertly powerful Satan in Paradise Lost or
Blake's inverse bible, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, with good guy devils
and bad guy angels. Clearly it's all a matter of view, disposition,
tolerance, taste, and, most important, the precise demands of individual
nature. Occasionally an artist embodies the full manifold, a many-folding
mind field, a replete and monstrous sheath turning out an underside of mind
and, as Blake said, "the infinite which was hid."
Jan Harrison answers to this description in her own way. She thrives in the
strange view. Her work says in every stroke: scratch the elegant surface
and you strike an icon, letting its daemon out. She thinks tenderly of
Pandora and opens her box for inspiration.
She offers thresholds of intimate other dimensions.
At the drop of a hat she sings creaturely love songs in unknown animal
tongues.
She helps us see/hear ourselves in the animal with the quality of the animal
finding itself in us. This puts an unthinkable, even unconscionable burden
on us a burden, however, welcomed by that part of us that is ready to be
warrior, pilgrim, or lover of Being itself.
When you look her sad, longing, animated daemonial creatures in their
beastly intimate eyes redly glowing, it mirrors, stirring an immemorial
familiarity. Its images can weigh us so far down we're looking out on our
world, and in a flash, bouncing back to reflection of my strange face.
Reach out and fuse someone-something, have a Minotaurial moment ancient myth tracing our own possible psychic confusion, our confusing possibility.
Who would I be in another kind of skin. What does it feel like to lie with
the cat half in its world, half in one's own.
She teaches us to have flashes of insight in the backbrain, reptilian
heartthrobs, the feel of the doubling serpentine tongue, amphibial fantasies
of a bliss of between between species, selves, worlds, dimensions.
Extrasensory surrender. Out of the body into another. Interspecies
self-portraiture. Totemic confession. Flying reveries. The torque of
dreaming awake with pastels blazing. This is liminal being with highwire
intensity and no more human vs. animal, and especially no more diminution of the animal as something sub-human, rather than the essential reality of any other in the natural mystery of its primacy.
If each being is unique to itself when it has the heart to see by way of its
ownmost vision, here is its art form, wherein a creature knows its right to
be in all its sexy weirdness.
Jan Harrison knows animals as full-scale beings, and she reflects us as only
full-scale to ourselves when we know and love the animal that fleshes us
out, in and over. The animal is a nature of being, of our being, and what
we call animal is being in its other ways than the forebrain projects.
Jan re-projects Pandora's terrors as primal panorama. She works the
self-imaging every natural thing is somehow part of, finds its strange
intelligence. Somehow its magic is to release us from our dying images, to
set us out on our journey of the precariously beautiful, with its unlimiting
energy and self-secret identity, and we are, to transpose Yeats, changed
utterly: A terrible beauty is born. G.Q. 2001
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