Jacq Groves
Bio: Jacq Groves (b. 1987, Denver, Colorado) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, educator and arts worker. Informed by scientific inquiry, play and speculative fiction, they create work that investigates the defiance of taxonomic categorization and reductive binaries. Jacq previously holds a BA in Art and Biology from Grinnell College. They have been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center and were recently the recipient of the Joan Sovern Sculpture Award and of a Dean's Project Grant. When not in their studio, they are avidly foraging and identifying mushrooms.
www.jacqgroves.com
Instagram: @jacqgroves
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: My process relies on an initial imagining of a symbiotic, community-driven world devoid of unyielding hierarchical structures. Yet inevitably, philosophical questions stemming from our anthropocentric nature seep into and complicate this idyllic world building. This friction is at the root of my practice.
My current practice questions the constrictive nature of European academic sciences and aims to re-envision life for those who defy reductive binaries. I foreground sculptural installations of mythical, not yet known, organisms to make visible alternative modes of being. These transformed morphologies act as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of sexuality, gender, and disability.
Drawing from my background in biological research and my lived experience, these works explore how we comprehend the unknown. I create forms that uncannily allude to natural structures and systems. From the blue-boned remnants of an otherworldly creature to gradually evolving corporeal forms, I disrupt the legibility of the recognizable. How can we use this shift in perception to objectively rethink what it means to have a body and how it interacts with the environment around us?
Interstitial Spaces (Concrete, wood, and porcelain, 2022)
First Year Exhibition
Configurations and Coding (34” x 37”, Cyanotypes on panel, 2021); Perceptual Inferences: Making a ______ (36” x 60” x 34”, Steel, wood, cement, porcelain, and mason stain, 2021)
