Jennifer Chernecki

I find my life to be romantic.

I possess an almost crippling need to create spaces and atmospheres. I enjoy invoking the senses and causing feelings of displacement amongst viewers. I use subversive acts and positioning to cause the double take or perhaps inspire self -psychoanalysis.  I entertain existential thoughts. I like to wonder "what ifs". I dream alternates to my current state of reality and then try to recreate them. I make children laugh with delight.

I love the freedom of choice that painting presents, and with it: the anxiety, the power struggle and the battle to control the chaos of its chemistry.  The process of creating an image entails a series of choices, each one equally as crucial and insignificant as the last, (as it is impossible to imagine the work as any other resultant). The importance, therefore, is not in the particular chosen steps of creating the work at all; rather it lies within the ability to make the choices: confidently, in the moment, and with hesitation and insecurities aside.
Eventually, at the height of the creative process, the immediate brain stops recognizing itself as having to make choices at all, the inertia of creation flattens itself into "sameness" and the artist is able to exist in a highly meditative state of calmness and control while continuing to work at almost frenetic pace.
This act of total immersion, the disappearance of time, the dismantling and reconstruction of signifiers and signified, neurological leaps and shifts and the complete and utter departure from all established "truths"… This is the painter's high I lust after.   

My work speaks of moments of awareness and contemplation, of being discovered while performing deeply personal acts often stemming from radical knowledge and archaic belief systems.
Throughout the painting process the root ideas are allowed free reign to grow and change. This method of painting, as one that evolves and reacts throughout the entire practice, forces both artist and audience to re-think established ideals, meditate, and wonder, not only on the image facade but also on the painting process itself as an act of discovery.

Jennifer Chernecki currently acts as the artist-in-residence for the Pitt Meadows Museum and is co-director of the micro-utopic restoration and redesign of a 106-year-old manor home for artists and the creative like.