Dickinson called the word “no” the “wildest word we consign to language". Her editors omitted it from the concordances of her work. This new work might be considered a supplement, a textual mend to those concordances.
Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere, a five channel video installation by Jen Bervin and Charlotte Lagarde, focuses on a poem written by Su
Hui, a Chinese poet in the 4th century. Her reversible poem, "Xuanji Tu” (Picture of the Turning Sphere), was based on an astronomical gauge and yields thousands of possible readings. This collaboration produced by Violet du Feng focuses on contemporary Chinese women's interdisciplinary perspectives on this embroidered poem.
In Jen Bervin’s large-scale installation River, an intricate model of the Mississippi River in hand-sewn silver sequins is inverted on the ceiling, mapped from a geocentric perspective from inside the earth’s interior looking up at the riverbed. It took twelve years to make: the same amount of time to sew each section of river that it would to walk the real one.
Cosmic Static features a sonic installation by Fayen d'Evie and Jen Bervin, in connection with Bervin’s participation in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI Institute) artist-in-residence program. It experiments with the dynamics of 'cosmic eavesdropping', combining a repurposed sculptural radio telescope feed from one of SETI’s arrays with an ultrasonic projection of field recordings and stories of individuals dedicated to listening for extraterrestrial signals.
Silk, as a material, is compatible with body tissues; our immune system accepts it on surfaces as sensitive as the human brain. In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting edge research on liquefied silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem fabricated nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor.
"This beautiful multi-disciplinary text becomes a meditation on desire and embodiment, on cultural and personal transformation, on the genetic coding of language and the enduring connection of poetic practice to other forms of making." —Elizabeth Willis
7S, or Seven Silks, is an artist book edition by Jen Bervin released by Granary Books that elaborates upon the research and writings that inform Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented as a biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab.
In Jen Bervin's performative drawing Silk Line, she used a white grease pencil on glass to draw forms based on the filament pattern the silkworm makes in creating its cocoon.
A series of large-scale embroidered quilts, The Dickinson Composites depict the poet Emily Dickinson’s variant marks in her manuscripts that have been omitted in print. The subtext for Bervin's series is Emily Dickinson’s textual practice, one obscured by a century of editorial interventions.
This artist book edition from Granary Books focuses on The Dickinson Composites, Jen Bervin's series of large scale embroideries on the poet Emily Dickinson's variant marks.
The Gorgeous Nothings by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is the first full-color facsimile trade book of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts.
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is a limited-edition artist book based on Dickinson's late compositions on envelopes.
Inspired by the work of Anni Albers, who used the typewriter as a way to create new patterns for woven design, Jen Bervin made the typed studies in the edition Draft Notation following intensive time spent weaving advanced cloth structures on the loom.
In these short videos by Jen Bervin based on Anni Alber's texts, she explores "new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language.”
A quietly monumental artist book inspired by James Turrell's Roden Crater, sewn through chapters of John Van Dyke's The Desert.
A cloud poem with intricate drawings, excisions, and typewritten text collaged on rice paper, created for web publication. The title comes from the HTML source code for a non-breaking space, which preserves a blank space between words and simultaneously prevents a line break.
A long spare poem a few years in the writing, typed on an Olympia de Luxe cursive typewriter. The silver cover stock paper is the same as that used as a substrate in the installation River.
A book created within a palimpsest of Shakespeare’s sonnets to yield crystalline and prescient new poems.
Over the course of a month, Jen Bervin made a large weaving directly onto Gridspace’s iron fence in Brooklyn.
This Object Has Been Removed, a collaborative installation, plays upon the trope of “removal” signage—which usually indicates that an object is on loan to another institution or is undergoing preservation treatment.
