Jens Pettersen BFA General Fine Arts Thesis Spring 2021
My work is intended as a dialogue, but rather than an entity that is there to tell you something, it exists as any first encounter with whoever is watching. Sometimes shy, sometimes curious. How do you even start a conversation? Your eyes meet each other as you are feeling each other out, dissecting and maneuvering through the motions of pleasant conversation. In bewildering ways the work craves a form of reaction, but is perhaps stunted when trying to explain itself. I am interested in this motion — the hesitancy of trying to figure something out when struck by an impactful impression. I conflate it with someone or something that wishes to garner attention. And I want to emphasize that I do not connect ‘wanting attention’ to someone being selfish, shallow or in any way superficial. Rather I think of it as a necessity in our culture, sometimes to feel cared for you have to shout it out yourself. There is in a way a dialogue implicits in the mark. In my work too there is also an underlying dialogue waiting to happen, because it has not yet started. The work is not necessarily about trying to tell you something, rather in this anthropomorphic way it talks about the underlying mystery that is connected to human interaction and how full of embarrassment and excitement it can be.