"Pink Parts and Other Gorgeous Nothings" Lumen #9, photograph by Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Jennifer Garza-Cuen is an artist from the Pacific Northwest. Currently Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art + Design at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, she received her MFA in photography and MA in the History of Art and Visual Culture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her BA summa cum laude in comparative literature was completed at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Garza-Cuen is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Photography, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Award, and the British Journal of Photography and 1854 Media’s Female in Focus Award. Additionally, she has received fellowships to attend residencies at Light Work, Ucross, Oxbow, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and the Vermont Studio Center. Public collections include Light Work, The Do Good Fund, the New Mexico History Museum and The Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Dear Dave, Contact Sheet, Musée, Papiers Paris, Blink, PDN, NR Magazine UK, Der Greif Germany, The Photo Review, and Conveyor as well as on-line journals such as: i-D, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, Fubiz, iGNANT, Dazed, and Juxtapoz. Garza-Cuen’s forthcoming monograph, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, in collaboration with Odette England will be published by Radius Books summer 2021.

Statement for Pink Parts and Other Gorgeous Nothings

Fold / envelop / lick and seal / a pale tint of red / non-existent // cover / enclose / words of injuries translated / A821 // to be involved in / within and without / entrances and exits / of a color intermediate between red and white // Mn2+/ holding moderately radical socio-political views / arrivals of departures / hysteria / to be moved emotionally / tickled / cut / to perforate / pink justice // pick / pierce / puncture / wound // a surgeon’s knife / circularly diagonal rectangles / layered / terra cotta / covers / sheets / paper on paper / a containing structure // light / bluish red hues // +1 Ag+ / concealing and revealing / intimacies / body and mind / violent exhaustion / thin and flat / rosy / ultra violet / halides of silver in four-flap arrangements // rolls of flesh / exposed scrolls / light-stained / undeveloped // 255, 192, 203 / fragments of fixed impermanence / mute tellers of providence // AgX / compound chemical / within and without / across the contours of open wounds / between red and white / in the absence of something // a color / folded / enveloped / sealed and licked