J Jan Groeneboer

The installation represents the first iteration of a project the artist has been developing since 2018. Following a period of over three years of exploratory research, photography, and writing about the view from his Brooklyn studio, Groeneboer took up a daily practice of filming over the subsequent two and a half years. The resulting footage highlights disparate elements of the cityscape that take on unexpected proximities to one another through the artist’s window: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; The Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn; a recycling plant; an electrical plant; the Port of New York and New Jersey; the Upper New York and Gowanus Bays; and the Statue of Liberty. Attending to the presence of the architectures and systems that often are hidden from daily city life, Selected Views contemplates the ways the built environment variously conceals and reveals interconnections between democracy, global capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, and environmental crises.

In conceiving Selected Views as a site-specific installation, Groeneboer augments the video’s investigations through engagement with the ambient features of The Kitchen’s loft at Westbeth—a setting that is defined by its own vistas, visible through a wall of windows overlooking the Hudson River and West Side Highway. Through its juxtaposition of two different vantage points within the installation, Selected Views carves out space to reflect on what can be learned by looking closely at what is present in—and absent from—any given perspective of the cityscape.

In tandem with the installation, Groeneboer will convene a panel discussion on January 13 exploring themes and processes that are central to Selected Views, such as observational practices in contemporary art, the ethics of looking, and the role of public monuments. Panelists include artist and scholar Malik Gaines; artist Zoe Leonard; and cellist, artist, and writer Ethan Philbrick.

J Jan Groeneboer: Selected Views is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator.

BIO

J Jan Groeneboer is a transgender conceptual interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. In his visual practice, he investigates how representation and abstraction connect to different forms of visibility, legibility, and comprehension. Groeneboer often works in abstraction to address the politics of representation. He developed this strategy to examine the expectation that transgendered people be readily available for visual scrutiny. Groeneboer’s work has shown at David Zwirner Gallery (2018), Boston University Galleries (2017), MoMA (2016), Art in General (2016), the Queens Museum (2016), CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (2016), MoMA PS1 (2015), Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015), Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts in Winnipeg (2015), Andrew Edlin Gallery (2013), Shoshawna Wayne Gallery (2010), and Exile, Berlin (2010), among others. Essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Art21.com, Mute Magazine, Artforum.com, Temporary Art Review, Art Journal, and in the essay in Pink Labour on Golden Streets, “Appearing Differently: Abstraction’s Transgender and Queer Capacities.” David Getsy’s 2016 essay “Seeing Commitments: Jonah Groeneboer’s Ethics of Discernment” was included in the “Opacities” section of Getsy and Che Gosset’s “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History” (Art Journal, Winter 2021). Residencies include Ox-Bow School of Art, the Fire Island Artist Residency, and Recess. He has received travel and/or project grants from Canada Council for the Arts in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022. As a writer, Groeneboer has participated in numerous panels and symposiums, and his recent essays on transgender representation were published in Texte Zur Kunst (2023) and in the Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023).