World Traveler / Shelter at Home

Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford, described vernacular photography as “what has always been excluded from photography’s history: ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.”

Artist Diana Jensen took inspiration from an anonymous assortment of vernacular photos for the paintings found in World Traveler / Shelter at Home. After contracting COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, a friend gave the artist a box of vintage travel slides found at an Asbury Park thrift store. Jensen used this feverish time of social isolation to immerse herself into the travels of a stranger. It was not her intention to duplicate the images, but to visually interpret what these scenes meant to the original owner. “Seeking the truth of the past, not simply historical record, I look for hidden expressions of intimacy and human interactions between the figures in the photographs.”

Artist Biography

Currently based in NYC, Diana Jensen creates paintings and installations that reference found vernacular photographs from the 1960s to the present day. Her art-making documents both the emotional connection and cultural impact of photo collecting.

Jensen’s recent solo exhibition, A Decade in Dumbo: 4 Installations, was featured at ChaShaMa, 1 Brooklyn Bridge Park. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Safe-T-Gallery in Brooklyn, White Columns in NYC, Bucheon Gallery in San Francisco, Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, The Newark Museum, and The Islip Art Museum.