"Maintaining a taboo is a deeply sacred act. Breaking a taboo is a deeply sacred act." Jennifer Kaufman

"Maintaining a taboo is a deeply sacred act. Breaking a taboo is a deeply sacred act." Jennifer Kaufman

Jennifer Kaufman

Jennifer H. Kaufman is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She has exhibited work at White Columns in New York, d.e.n. Contemporary Art and Pharmaka Gallery in Los Angeles, the 808 Gallery at Boston University, and a number of Bay Area galleries. Rather than starting with an anticipated image, her work begins with a strong sense of sound and an internal cadence particular to the moment, an in-audible meeting that translates to motion and material: line as letter, tether to cord, tether to utter, cord to code.

kaufmanarts.com

Part #2 - LABA PROJECT

winter 2023


On My Tongue and in my Hand: Fragments from the Fire

In both text and image, my project considers taboos related to the act of making images or any likeness, speech and God's name as taboo, talking with the dead, and how silliness can be sacred.

Part I
In the Beginning, There is the Line
ink on paper

The drawing was made using ink-soaked noodles as a stylus or quill in my hand. The scroll of paper lay on the studio floor and was attached to the wall while I marked the paper with handfuls of noodles. My drawing is an image-less origin story built from a language of fragments, sacred intentions, and chance actions.

Part II
On My Tongue and in my Hand: Fragments from the Fire
prose poems

These poems reimagine scenes from the Torah, scenes with Frankenstein (an origin story in himself), and scenes where visual artists are grappling with their taboo impulses.

“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth,” Exodus 20:4.

Part #1 - Explore

Spring 2023

We are 1/3 through the year-long LABA fellowship. Tell me what you are thinking so far about the theme of TABOO and your current project idea inspired by it.

I am working on a project about encounters between the living and the dead. Drawings and writing explore Frankenstein as the Chief Librarian in the great library of Alexandria. Frankenstein did not speak words, but he was the keeper of words, a guardian or shomer of punctuation, grammar, everything between the letters and between the letters and parchment.

I have wanted to be an artist, a writer, and work with the chevra kadisha (holy burial society) since I was 8 years old, but it was such a strange and taboo thing to consider that I kept it under wraps until I was much older.

Maintaining a taboo is a deeply sacred act.

Breaking a taboo is a deeply sacred act.

IMAGE: Artistic Rendering of the Library of Alexandria, based on some archaeological evidence by O. Von Corven