Maren Jensen
Straw Pyramid/Straw House

11.17.23–12.18.23

Straw Pyramid/ Straw House

Weaving builds upon an inherent study of architecture—the construction of the image is physical and dimensional, more akin to laying bricks than to painting a house. Because there is a sense of building her work from the ground up, the consideration of structure and space is deeply embedded into Jensen's practice. What informs spatial design, whether it be the drawing of borders and property lines or an abstract network interconnecting our world, is a question that guides her work.

Jensen's practice draws on her experiences of eviction, witnessing the exponential stratification of wealth within her lifetime growing up in Portland, Oregon, and navigating the grief of sudden death. While thinking about how the pursuit of wealth has shaped the land, the violence lines drawn have wrought, and how it feels to be experiencing life interwoven with these realities, the work emerges as a disorganized and often abstract imagery relying on an intuitive sense for color and shape, sometimes dotted with a precise and distilled poetry.

Maren Jensen

Maren Jensen's work has been supported by residencies at MassMoCA (2022), Andrea Zittel's experimental land project A-Z West (2017-2018), as well as by grants received from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) in Portland, Oregon. In 2022 Jensen was selected as a featured artist for Portland Textile Month (PTXM), accompanied by a solo exhibition. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, most recently in Los Angeles, CA (Noon Projects), and Santa Fe, NM (Smoke The Moon). She recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2023), and received her BA from Clark University in Worcester, MA.