Jenn Figg is an artist currently based in New York City. She graduated with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (1996), an MFA from University of California at Santa Barbara (2007), and is working on a Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University.  She is currently an Artist in Residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Councils’ Swing Space program on Governor’s Island.  Other selected residencies and awards include the Millay Colony, the MacDowell Colony, Accessibility 2009 Artist in Residence, the Brython-Davis Research Fellowship, a UCSB Humanities / Social Sciences Research Grant, and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Visual, Media, and Performing Arts Award.  Solo shows include the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia (2010) and the Arlington Arts Center (2009).

I am drawn to changing conceptions of environment, architecture, objects, and icons as I explore cultural and creative connections in art history and social critique. My interests focus on the complex relationship between nature and culture, informed by ancient mythology, systemic cultural narratives, Buddhism, and ecology. My recent works are symbolic sites of dissonance that depict seemingly impossible situations and juxtapositions in order to question the fictions of the contemporary world—a place marked by shifting archetypes and impacted environment.  These are places usually hidden, both figuratively and metaphorically.  Whether it is locating the monstrous in the forest, layering imaginary worlds upon the real, or drawing connections among the decimation of Superfund sites, poetry, and the natural history museum, my work is a play between the everyday and the extraordinary. Landscape is where I find connections among the hidden, the exposed, the natural, the cultivated, the abstracted, the actual, and the artificial.