JENN DEWALD
By JENNIFER EDWARDS AKA JEN/ED

Emergency-room nurse, educator, and visual artist Jenn DeWald is a woman with much to say. This exciting mixed-media collage artist and painter focuses on topics ranging from gay rights and gender identity to women’s issues, politics, and war.

Jenn is a primarily self-taught artist who initially became a nurse, ten years ago, for two reasons: to help victims of rape and domestic violence and to pay the bills. Now she finds both artistic inspiration and opportunities to educate in the emergency room. She relates stories of post-op transgender individuals who are misunderstood by many in mainstream medicine, individuals whom she advocates for on a regular basis. Same-sex couples, individuals suffering with advanced stages of HIV, or simple patient questions of, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” offer much fodder for good art, not to mention activism.

Jenn creates in her home/studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the space is filled with her work. She has a series of what she calls “portable art,” smaller pen and ink drawing/ collage pieces that chronicle everything from a recent trip to Spain to work inspired by various concerts and performances she has attended. Drawings of queer up-and-coming artists along with Indy icons like Bitch, Allison Miller, Nadine Goellner, Denise Barbarita, Baron, Pandora Scooter, and Doria Roberts fill her portfolio. Many of these have found their way to album covers, T-shirts, promotional materials, and private collections of the artists.

Lining one wall of the apartment is a series entitled "Hospital Junk." This is a true collaboration of art and allopathic medicine, as DeWald comments on a system that pollutes the environment while trying to “save” patients. Ironically, Jenn is quick to add, many of the chronic illnesses she sees are due to the toxic environment in which we live. “It’s one big, vicious cycle,”she states. Included in “Hospital Junk” is a full-sized hospital bed containing a decapitated body built of recyclable hospital “clean waste” that is never recycled. Three separate canvases hold protruding heads that, when hung together, form the façade
of a hospital building. Each head is also constructed using these recyclable waste products Jenn carried home from the hospital. Lastly are five miniature beds containing full-bodied patients made of hospital junk. The heads of three of these small sculptures are manufactured using pages from medical textbooks and anatomy books. The artist, one could say, is utilizing several of the many waste products of Western medicine.

"Art serves as both a way for me to communicate and teach others and as a creative therapy for myself,” states Jenn. “It is a much needed outlet for the stress and sadness that I consume.” Jenn shares experiences of seeing death on a daily basis. Much of her work is emotionally provocative. "I use art to communicate what is sometimes hard to express in words. I want my audience to be allowed to have an interaction with topic matter they may not be able to connect with in other ways." Having said that, DeWald, also a writer, offers examples of work where ideas are explored through both image and text.

As an individual who has experienced rape and violence in her own life, Jenn particularly enjoys when she can share her work with organizations that are working for change. Several pieces were part of a show in the fall of 2006 hosted by an organization called “Safe Zone.” The organization holds an annual festival of art in Honolulu called, “Girl Fest Hawaii.” Two pieces that were part of this exhibition are titled, Window of Truth I, and, II. Both explore ideations of anorexia and bulimia. Yet another piece, To Our Father, uses text to convey situations of patriarchy, religion, and sexual abuse.

While activist art is nothing new, Jenn DeWald finds curators and collectors continually surprised that a woman is making such work. “While I am a woman, a lesbian, and a mother, I identify first and foremost as an artist. Art, just as pure emotion, can be genderless.”

The recently completed series, Unite, explores the issues of gay marriage and equality within the LGBTQ community. Jenn finds this a compelling and personal topic, because she wishes to marry her partner of five-and-a-half years. This desire deepened considerably last summer when DeWald legally adopted Anthony, her partner’s biological son, whom she has co-parented and considers her own. “I want to live in a society that is able to see the commitment and love the three of us share as valuable, just as valuable as every other family.”

The Unite series consists of six pieces of collage/paintings. The mixture of rainbow colors and distorted, colorless figures depicts this artist’s interpretation of both the LGBTQ community and the mainstream media hype surrounding a topic that has been pushed to the political forefront. Texts from the Bible and childhood textbooks express sentiments, such as, “Love is kind” and, “Someday I will marry someone.” There is also a depiction of the US Capitol building in several works, one showing three men engaging in CPR with the word resuscitation under the Capitol dome.

Currently DeWald is working on several paintings in collaboration with queer poet Natalie E. Illum. Ms. Illum was born with spastic cerebral palsy. Her work reflects her experiences from childhood to the present. Natalie approached Jenn, asking her to create visual representations of her physical form based on the way in which “the artist views her body under the influence of her poems.” “This is a very intense process. I know much about the mechanical aspect of Natalie’s CP. I understand it from a medical perspective. However, this project calls on me to psychologically inhabit everything from her premature birth and her relationship to her mother, to her daily existence and the challenges she faces in maneuvering through life, relationships, and self-expression.”

Jenn’s next project is a return to an earlier idea of lesbian relationships, with a focus on death and dying. “We see so many depictions of heterosexual couples going through life transitions. I like to make art that directly relates to my life and my reality. My feeling is that while we are slightly different, no one is unique; therefore we all experience some similar things. Love, age, family, and even the process of death are topics we can explore together.”

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To view examples of Jenn DeWald’s work, visit www.jenndewald.com. Contact Jenn at jenndewaldart@yahoo.com.

Jennifer Edwards a.k.a. JEN/ed is a performing artist/writer/lecturer, and a yoga, meditation, relaxation, communication teacher and coach,
who collaborates daily with Jenn DeWald.