bio

Jenny Nirgends, is the artist name of American born Mexican multidisciplinary artist, she works in animation, sculpture, printmaking and collage.

Her works deal with themes of memory, personal mythologies and family history. She received her MFA in experimental animation at California Institute of Arts in 2023. In her film Siempre a las Doce,(2019), a hybrid animated documentary , she interviews her grandmother and aunts about the myths that haunted them as children. In it she investigates the concept she coined as “inherited fear.” In unifying their stories through animation and merging the monsters they speak of, she creates a single shapeshifting amorphous being, in the process distilling the essence of her own fear — “my grandmother calls it the devil — I call it uncertainty”. This is a theme she continues to work with through different mediums. The film has screened in Los Angeles and in Mexico city where it received a special selection in the Stop- motion MX festival. She has had two solo shows in Los Angeles, the first Halftone Cotillion featured collage paintings, intaglio prints, and large scale screen-prints including several photochromic works “Plastic Virgin” and “Just like Candy” that deal with thematically deconstructing the male gaze and lolita complex. Her second solo show Haunted Places, featured many of her works created during her residency at Cal Arts, spanning the medium of collage, sculpture and video installation pieces she terms performing objects. This includes several of video altar memory palaces including Salon Itzlan, (2022) , and Ommetaphobia (2021). These diorama pieces use miniature scale and imbedded video elements to attempt to capture and translate the aura of real spaces that haunt her memory.

artwork