Janet Biggs

Janet Biggs
Born 1959
Nationality American
Education Moore College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Known for Video Art, Photography, Performance Art

Janet Biggs is an American artist, known for her work in video, photography and performance art. Biggs lives and works in New York City.

Biggs' video works often include images of individuals in extreme landscapes or situations. She has worked with miners underground, champion wrestlers, speed-obsessed bikers, synchronized swimmers, Arctic explorers, sulfur miners inside an active volcano, and camel herders in the Taklamakan Desert. Her earlier video work dealt with issues of psychosis and psychotropic drugs.

Recent work

In addition to videos, her recent work includes multi-discipline performances, often including multiple large-scale videos, live musicians, and athletes.

Biggs' recent work has taken her inside a volcano in Indonesia, where she filmed sulfur minors for "A Step on the Sun," and to the Taklamakan Desert in western China, where she spent a week on camel to film "Point of No Return." "A Step on the Sun" was premiered in a solo screening at the 2013 Armory Art Fair in New York City.

Exhibitions and screenings

Biggs has recently been presented in solo shows and screenings at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York City, Connersmith Gallery in Washington, DC, Barbara Polla's Analix Forever Gallery in Geneva, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn NY, and Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt Germany.

In June 2017, at David Lynch's Club Silencio in Paris, Biggs presented a premier of her performance piece, "Far From Home," which incorporated a live musical performance by Rhys Chatham and a reading by Frank Smith with video of her recent work in a Yemeni refugee camp in Djibouti and at the Mars Desert Research Station.

In 2015, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, presented Biggs' Echo of the Unknown, a multidimensional exhibition combining video, sound, and objects that explore the role of memory in the construction of identity. Drawing from her personal memories of the effects of Alzheimer’s on family members, heroic stories of public figures coping with the disease, and research conducted with neurologists and geoscientists, Biggs raises fundamental questions about how we become–and how we lose our sense of–who we are. In conjunction with Echo of the Unknown, Blaffer collaborated with more than a dozen UH colleges and Houston institutions on the Blaffer Art Museum Innovation Series, an ambitious slate of lectures, gallery talks and panel discussions, enhancing the exhibition’s role as a catalyst for cross-disciplinary learning.

In 2014 Biggs was exhibited in the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartegena de Indias. [1]

The Tampa Museum of Art presented a survey of Biggs' work in 2011. Biggs' video work has also been shown in solo exhibitions at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Glaskasten Marl Sculpture Museum (Marl, Germany), the Mint Museum (Charlotte NC),[2] the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC), the McNay Museum (San Antonio, Texas), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Videonale 13 (Bonn, Germany) and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 2012, Biggs' Arctic Trilogy was screened as part of the Environmental Film Festival at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC),

Biggs travelled to the far Arctic in 2009-2010, where she captured images of individuals' interaction with extremes environments above and below the ice. Biggs used this footage to create three videos, "The Arctic Trilogy." These videos were premiered at Ed Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea (New York City) in February 2011. This show was reviewed in the New York Times by Holland Carter.[3]

On July 14, 2009, Vanishing Point was screened at New York's River To River Festival. That same evening, Biggs' videos accompanied an ambient performance by Anthony Gonzalez of the band M83.

Recognition

The artist was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 2018.[4]

In 2016, Biggs was selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson as part of ArtReview magazine's "Future Greats - the artists to look out for in 2016."

The October 2015 Art In America featured an article written by Faye Hirsch on Biggs' work, with a focus on the Blaffer exhibition.[5]

ArtNew's April 2015 cover article "Art Made in Harm's Way" by Lily Wei featured Biggs' travels to Ethiopia's border conflict, where she filmed local Afar militia as they patrolled the Ethiopian/Eritrean border.[6]

In 2013 Biggs was awarded a la Napoule Art Foundation Riviera Residency, and in 2009 and 2010 she was selected for The Arctic Circle High Arctic Expedition residency. She received an Art Matters Project grant in 2010. Janet Biggs was a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 2011 and 2009 through the New York Experimental Television Center. She has received additional funding grants from Art Matters, the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte, and the Goodrich Foundation. In 2004 she received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship,[7] and received a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989.

Contemporary Magazine profiled Janet Biggs in their March 2007 issue, and one of her photographs was used as the cover of Spot magazine's Summer 2007 issue.

Commercial work

Biggs was commissioned by Puma to create a short film as part of their 2012 Films4Peace initiative.[8]

In 2006, Hermès commissioned Biggs to create a new work of art for their flagship New York store. Biggs installed 11 large monitors in the store's Madison Avenue windows, as well as photographs of equestrian-themed images.

Collections

Her work is in the permanent collections of Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain (FRAC), Languedoc-Roussillon, France; Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl (Ruhr Kunst Museen), Marl, Germany; the Tampa Museum of Art; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Mint Museum of Art, [2] Charlotte; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca; and The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut.

Representation

Biggs works with Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York City, CONNERSMITH (Washington, DC), Analix Forever (Geneva, Switzerland), and Galerie Anita Beckers/blink video (Frankfurt, Germany).

Selected bibliography

Reviews of Biggs' work have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, Flash Art, Artnet.com, and many others.

References

  1. ↑ "Over 16,000 People Attend Opening Weekend of 1st International Contemporary Art Biennial in Cartagena". Artworld.com. February 19, 2014.
  2. 1 2 "Q & A with Janet Biggs". Retrieved 3 March 2016.
  3. ↑ Carter, Holland (February 18, 2011). "JANET BIGGS: 'The Arctic Trilogy'". New York Times. pp. C29. Retrieved 2011-02-18.
  4. ↑ "Janet Biggs". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved April 14, 2018.
  5. ↑ Hirsch, Faye (October 2015). "A Crystal Grotto" (PDF). Art in America. p. 8.
  6. ↑ Wei, Lily (April 2015). "Art Made in Harm's Way". ArtNews. p. 6.
  7. ↑ "Anonymous Was a Woman Awards 10 Women Artists with $25,000 Grants". Absolute Arts. January 11, 2005. Retrieved 2008-01-19.
  8. ↑ "JANET BIGGS / Films for Peace". Archived from the original on 2013-12-13.
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