Candy Jernigan Essay

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CANDY JERNIGAN “In 1980, as I set out on my first trip to Europe, I decided to make a book that would contain any and all physical proof that I had been there: ticket stubs, postcards, restaurant receipts, airplane and bus and railroad ephemera. On successive trips, these collections grew to include food smears, hotel keys, found litter, local news, pop tops, rocks, weather notations, leaves, bags of dirt--anything that would add information about a moment or a place, so that the viewer could make a new picture from the remnants. Objects emerged for me as ‘icons’ for particular cities and these objects became the material for EVIDENCE.” Candy Jernigan was little known outside New York’s avant-garde art world during her life. The artist was a dedicated collector of unusual evidence. Committed to documenting “any and all physical ‘proof’ that I had been there,” Jernigan transformed the mundane stuff of the world into witty and astoundingly resonant works of art. Jernigan filled her journals with traces of food she had eaten, scraps of paper, bits of leaves, and old bottle caps--all lovingly labeled and sealed in transparent envelopes. Her more formal works are equally reflective of her compulsive desire to collect and document: Found Dope is an exquisitely detailed arrangement of all the crack vials Jernigan found near her New York apartment over one sixteen day period. Jernigan's work offers a transformative vision of the things most of us try to ignore. “This collection of bugs originally appeared in a hand-made volume entitled Dead Bug Book. Featuring fifty pencil drawings on index cards, it was inspired by Candy Jernigan’s discovery of myriad bug corpses when she reopened her summer home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Instead of being repelled by these specimens, she used them as her subjects. This sampling from that book suggests that beauty is unpredictable

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