Jehanne-Marie Gavarini

Areas of Expertise

Visual Art; Visual Culture  

Email: gavarini@brandeis.edu

Current Project

Next year, I intend to keep working on my project "From Private House to Public Home: Domestic Politics in the Twenty-First Century."  I will keep creating sculptures that address domestic politics and the ideological shifts since September 11, 2001. These sculptures combine domestic items with materials such as camouflage fabric and hardware. They underline the ways in which war has become an acceptable backdrop while citizens are pushed to be evermore obedient and unquestioning. In addition to creating this new body of work, I will try to find a venue to exhibit it.

Biography

Jehanne-Marie Gavarini is an interdisciplinary artist and writer.  Her work examines contemporary compulsions and collective anxieties and is fueled by her interest in human ambivalence toward social rules and cultural norms.  Her installations address social issues such as gender dynamics, power struggles, and violence.  In the last five years, Gavarini’s work has investigated desire, seduction, fantasies, and sexuality as subjects of representation. Her objects bridge the public and private realms by combining domestic items with industrial materials such as metal and hardware.  Jehanne-Marie’s research interests include visual studies, film, gender studies, and cultural theory. She is the co-translator of Tomboy an autobiographical novel by acclaimed Franco-Algerian writer Nina Bouraoui, to be published in 2007.

Jehanne-Marie’s work has been exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. She is the recipient of several awards, grants, and residencies. Her work has been recognized by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Bronx Council on the Arts.  In 2000, she was an artist in residence at the Centre de Recherche d’Echange et de Diffusion pour l’Art Contemporain in Ivry-sur-Seine, France. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Education

M.F.A., University of California Davis

B.A., University of California Berkeley

Representative Publications

“in and around us.” David Winton Bell Gallery- List Art Center. Brown University. Providence, RI. 2005

Bouraoui, Nina. Tomboy. Trans. M.A. Salvodon and J. Gavarini. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Links

Personal Web Page

Tomboy