Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect Selected Works (1997-2020)

University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020) from August 15 through December 13, 2020. Bervin is currently one of the SETI Institute's Artists-in-Residence (SETI AIR).

In accordance with public health guidance, attendance at University Galleries will be kept under 50 at all times and visitors must book an appointment. Please see additional information below.

Shift Rotate Reflect, the first survey of work by American poet and artist Jen Bervin, will present twenty-three solo and collaborative projects, artist’s books, embroideries, videos, drawings, prints, and a performance created from 1997–2020. The selected works demonstrate the interdisciplinary range of Bervin’s long-term research on topics including legacies of women artists and writers, relationships between text and textiles, and abstractions of language and landscape.

The exhibition will premiere Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere (2016–2020), a collaboration with filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde. The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji Tu.” Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in any direction to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations. Bervin and Lagarde created a rotation of four projected videos featuring commentary from eight Chinese women: an algorithmic game theorist, calligrapher, art researcher, astrophysicist, artist, novelist, and literary scholars. Bervin and Lagarde also partnered with a contemporary embroidery studio in Suzhou, China, to create two new renderings of the poem using a specialized double-sided silk embroidery technique on translucent silk screens. The finished embroideries and a video projection of the embroidery process are included in the installation.

Three other major projects, in addition to individual works, will be featured in this exhibition: The Dickinson Composites (2004–2008), River (2006–2018), and Silk Poems (2010–2017). For Silk Poems, Bervin partnered with scientists at Tufts University to fabricate a nanoimprinted poem on a silk biosensor. Her silk research spanned thirty international nanotechnology and biomedical labs, textile archives, medical libraries, and sericulture sites. The full project is comprised of the nanoimprinted poem on a microscope for viewing; a video documenting Bervin’s research and process by Charlotte Lagarde; and the Silk Poems book featuring Bervin’s poem written from the perspective of a silkworm and composed in a six-character chain corresponding to the DNA structure of silk. River is a scale model of the Mississippi River from the geocentric point of view, hand-stitched in silver sequins and spanning 230 curvilinear feet. The Dickinson Composites, a series of 6 x 8 feet embroideries, is comprised of stitched composites of the variant marks American poet Emily Dickinson used in her manuscripts to link alternate words and phrases. These marks and the original line breaks were often omitted by editors for print editions, and Bervin describes The Dickinson Composites as being “aligned with mending, restitution, and the deeper gesture that Dickinson’s poems and variant marks make.”

Shift Rotate Reflect is curated by Kendra Paitz, University Galleries’ director and chief curator. This exhibition is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency. An exhibition catalogue, which is also supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, is forthcoming in 2021.

For more information visit https://galleries.illinoisstate.edu/exhibitions/2020/jen-bervin/