ARTIST STATEMENT

Jenny Hartt’s work navigates the threshold between the seen and the remembered—between the lucid, camera-sharp description of the world and the intuitive, neurological blur through which we actually perceive it. Working primarily in oil and acrylic but freely crossing into gouache, ink, collage, and film, she uses both realism and abstraction as complementary languages. One isolates the surface of reality; the other reveals the circuitry beneath it.

Jenny’s paintings frequently stage moments of stillness—a door reflecting autumn daylight, a figure seen from behind, a chair, a dog dreaming—but these quiet scenes hum with the residual charge of memory and observation. Many of her subjects carry an undercurrent of technology or mediation: vintage cameras, photographic light, printed graphics, or coded pattern systems. They serve as metaphors for the way humans store, transmit, and distort experience.

Across both modes of tight representation and free abstraction, Jenny Hartt weaves a consistent thread of perceptual inquiry. Her imagery evokes how we first learned to see: as children, when form and color were both wonder and warning, discovery and risk. She borrows visual rhythms from album art, product design, comic panels, and the layered glow of screens, not to mimic them but to reclaim their power of immediacy.

Sound and motion often play roles in her process. She paints to music, treating tempo as compositional gravity, and considers this a way to dissolve the boundaries of age, gender, and identity within the act of making. Just as we so often can experience our solitude despite the social intensity of our political and technological moments in time through listening to music, these pieces are a visual corollary of sorts, to that experience. What results are paintings that live at the intersection of optics and empathy—images that feel both familiar and slightly dislocated, like memories remembered through another person’s eyes.

Her work ultimately asks: what remains of the real once it has passed through perception, circuitry, and time? Each painting is an experiment in that translation—part scientific observation, part visual poem.