Artist Statement:

Jennifer Liston Munson’s work for her show Looking In + Looking Out creates lenses for the viewer to look in and for the subjects themselves to look back out. Her selection of art objects, ghostly figures, and landscapes call into question historical collection practices, the complexity of narratives, and the notion of belonging. Looking In + Looking Out incorporates images of objects held in museum collections, photographs of unknown relatives, and abandoned historically significant interiors. In some of the pieces, Liston Munson makes the landscape the subject; spaces, trees, and enigmatic watery pools that remain while the bodies they contain dissolve to time, as layers of paint ooze from the edges to mark the art making process and the past. Other works look at architecture and history close up, making the past present. A series from an interior room of the Alcazar in Toledo, Spain captures bullet holes in worn wallpaper caught in the crossfire of the Spanish Civil War. Sculptural towers layer colored resin blocks which archaeologically obscure buried images of historically significant objects normally held in museum vitrines, detached from their cultures of origin for eternity, and asking the viewer to consider how the museum practice impacts both the objects’ and the viewers’ perspectives. 

Bio:

Jennifer Liston Munson is a Boston area artist who was born in New York and grew up in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University, and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Jennifer studied painting at Loughborough College of Art and Design in England. She was a Traveling Scholar and received a fellowship to show her work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Jennifer teaches at the SMFA at Tufts University and has an exhibition design practice that focuses on placemaking for historic and contemporary art objects.  Her work is s held in corporate and private collections and is currently represented by curator Beth Kantrowitz at bk projects, as well as the Kingston Gallery.

More information about Jennifer Liston Munson is available here:

@jlmunson28    (instagram)                            

jenniferlistonmunson.com

Jennifer Liston Munson. (linkedin)

Artist Page (Kingston Gallery)

Press Release