Jennifer Schlesinger

New Mexico photographer, Jennifer Schlesinger, lives a visual life. If she is not creating her own masterful work, she's busy promoting other photographic images in her day job, as the Gallery Director for Verve Gallery in Santa Fe. Jennifer can often be found as a reviewer at various portfolio events, sharing her expertise, not only as someone with rarefied eyes, but someone who also knows what it feels like to be on both sides of the gallery reception desk.

Born in Conneticut, and schooled in photography at the College of Santa Fe, Jennifer's new series, Object Diaspora, explores the spiritual and sacred attachment to "things". In her appoach to this subject, she uses a large format pinhole camera adding to the intangible and ethereal quality of what is sacrosanct. Jennifer will be exhibiting this work at the Verve Gallery, and the show opens this Friday, May 14th, and runs through July 3rd, 2010.

I have photographed sacred objects that have belonged to someone else in an attempt to merge the memory and the spirit of the person in which the object originally belonged to, as well as the person whose possession it now resides, placing the sacred object into a new milieu. Like people who migrate from one country to another looking to begin a new life, these objects travel, get placed in a new environment and become part of the new culture they belong to. We breathe our spirit into these objects, and we use them with the spirit of the person who gave them to us, they become an “Object Diaspora.”