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Jennifer Copp

Jennifer Bronwynn Copp
Photography, Video & Multi-Media Installation

Born 1972 - Syracuse, New York
BFA Photography - Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA, 1995
MFA Photography and Related Media, Video Concentration - School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, 2004

Most of my work deals with a sense of place, and how a particular location can help shape one’s state of mind. The second theme in my work involves an attempt to figure out how one fits into the world, the idea of one’s placement in society. My newest project, a feature length documentary, uses adoption as subject to research who we are and why we feel a connection to the people that we are biologically related to.

As the Child of theatre academics I got to experience the arts early. Both my parents worked in community theatre as a director (Mom) and additionaly (Dad) as a playwrite, set, lighting and custom designer. The focus of many family discussions was about the setting of events, both staged and real. The dinner table talk had to do with where, when and how life situations took place. As a photographer I digested this view of life and began to see staged tableaus in every place that I encountered. I could see in my mind the moment before and after the event that I was capturing with my camera.

In rebellion to the “in the moment” focus of a live theatrical event, I worked instead to try to collect and obsessively control moments in time. There was a prevelant feeling for me that I wanted to save moments, more than I wanted them to happen briefly and then vanish and be gone. By recording moments in time I could go back and look at them again and again.

One of my projects, Alone in New York (B&W photography, 2004 – ongoing) is a series of images of a New York that is uncharacteristically quiet. Where people are held in solitary moments in the midst of the movement and energy of a huge city. Where did these people come from, and where are they going? My images talk about the architecture and visual uniqueness of a city caught at rest. Sometimes we feel alone and sometimes we feel content, and at certain moments there is time to think. I have been photographing in New York for several years now. I am captivated with the light and the small moments in time that occur with every neighborhood that I find.

For me it is important to bring the ideas of land use, public space and how we use that space into the public vocabulary. Of equal importance is to bring to light the ideas of the fractured identity through adoption, divorce, family and the public view of what is family. I am intrigued with the power that the arts have to enact change. I use photography and video as a mirror and spotlight. I hope to encourage people to see their common world in a new way, which might instigate internal and external change in their lives.

Theatre production has never left my creative impulses, as I continue to use still photography. I am also in the process of producing an installation, Dis/Connected, which is a multi-media project based on my documentary about adoption, Date of Birth. Dis/Connected is also currently a touring workshop and installation addressing the emotional impact of adoption and identity.

My hope is to continue to bring my projects, both still photography and multi-media to galleries as well as untraditional locations. I want to bring the idea of questioning identity and our place in our contemporary world into the public consciousness through my ongoing projects.