#What’s Next? | JANET JAFFKE

Finding the Next Big Challenge

After my residency/exhibition with Michael David this summer (at Art Cake, Brooklyn, NY), I decided that the next challenge for me would be to tackle a site specific installation, something I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while.

Having worked in Gallery B at Art Cake for a month, I was quite familiar with the space. It’s a long narrow room 18 ft. x 33 ft. with an incredible 17 ft. ceiling. The space feels open and expansive and a perfect place to have an installation. With the mentorship and confidence of Michael behind me now it seems like the right time and place.

I’ve never made installation work before and will need to scale up my thinking and approach from the work I’m doing now. For me, this is a huge leap of faith and courage, but I think I work best when I challenge myself.

There will be several obstacles with this project, in addition to creating the work on one continent and then shipping it to another.

I have to juggle the thoughts about what I want to do and what is possible both financially and physically. I don’t want all my choices to be made around what I can and cannot do, but in reality the limitations have to be considered. I hope to keep the expression as the driving force and then work to create the expression within the limitations.

I’ll need to work in a scale that is larger than my current studio can house. I decided to work with a model scaled to the size of the room. A model can help me define how I want the viewer to move through the space. It will also help me determine a focal point and main compositional elements.

I went through a lengthy process of considering all possibilities regarding the theme / materials / process. It’s not fully fleshed out yet but it’s becoming clearer. I felt the only way to work through all my thoughts was to create a mind map that took note of every thought that came to mind. I needed to feel like I could explore many ideas and didn’t want to lose any of them.