Top
Work by Jennifer Laiwint: three-panel video still of people with closed eyes against gray backdrops, the first cropped at the nose.
Work by Jennifer Laiwint: book page headed "About Psychotechnics" in red and black type, split by a dark vertical band.
Work by Jennifer Laiwint: video still of a person with dark curly hair and black glasses looking at the camera in front of a gray backdrop.
Work by Jennifer Laiwint: black-and-white portrait of a smiling bald man captioned "How to Relax", beside text on relaxing, "Calm, Relax, Let Go".
Work by Jennifer Laiwint: grid of small video portraits of seven people against gray backdrops on black, one holding hands to her head.
No items found.

Jennifer Laiwint is a Canadian visual artist working across the disciplines of photography, video, installation and socially engaged performance. Her practice is preoccupied with psychologically charged subject matter, using constructed imagery and staged narratives to navigate lines between truth and fiction.

Jennifer’s current work explores the trust we put into healers and experts who promise easy transformation and what that can reveal about how we perform and articulate selfhood. By staging and filming “private,” self-help style sessions on relaxation and fear, she explores what might transpire when bringing the project of self-help into a constructed, relational space and questions whether an authentic transformation can occur. Through the process of collecting and coalescing these disparate experiences Jennifer aims to create a narrative-based, dialogical exchange between different participants and asks how we perform and articulate the aspirational self, the isolated self and the autonomous self.

Read more

Learn more about the Curatorial Fellowship