Bryan Martin on Jen DeLuna
Family Style
August 1, 2024
For “Dust and Sweat and Feigning Grace,” the 25-year-old artist’s interest pivoted to photographs of amateur nude models that unexpectedly popped into her collection after she found herself gravitating towards the female form and began searching for vintage images of women on eBay. The first that came up in this query were staged erotic nudes that the artist found natural in a social media-saturated world where images of women are highly doctored. “I understand that they’re still posed and made up, but a lot of times, they look so natural,” she observes. “Things hang in a certain way, the looseness or the folds. It feels so different to me.” In Timid Repetitions, a jubilant, naked woman fluidly hangs in space. The artist’s intervention and manipulation of these images happens on her own terms rather than through a predetermined filter. The works contain a sense of authenticity that emancipates them from societal expectations. – Bryan Martin