John Yau reviews Jen Bervin: Source in Hyperallergic. Of the artist’s first West Coast survey and the inaugural exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery's newly expanded 9,200 square-foot space, he writes: "An unclassifiable artist and a deep reader, Jen Bervin has expanded the notion of what it is to be a poet in the 21st century."
Published for the first survey exhibition of artist and poet Jen Bervin (b. 1972), Shift Rotate Reflect features 23 individual and collaborative projects from 1997 to 2020. The works demonstrate the range of her interdisciplinary research, including the legacies of women artists and writers, relationships between text and textiles, and abstractions of language and landscape. This 192-page monograph is available here.
In this new artist book from Granary Books, Bervin responds to the omission of the word 'no' in The Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by S.P. Rosenbaum (Cornell University, 1964). A concordance indexes the words a major author has used in her work over the course of her lifetime. Each word is listed alphabetically and chronologically, indexed, and cited in order of frequency. Dickinson used the 'nonsignificant' word 'no' 395 times. 'Yes' which was included? Four. What is significant to a poet writing to further 'no?'
Jen Bervin’s work has been covered in national and international publications and media outlets such as NPR, The Nation, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic, and The New Yorker.