Jannell Turner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She attended the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture for several years earlier in her training. She has exhibited her work in two solo shows—one in Manhattan and the other in Brooklyn. Turner has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Illinois, Tennessee, Vermont, and California. She curated two painting shows in Brooklyn, “Painting in the Digital Age,” at Trestle Gallery in 2013, and “Walking is a Way of Knowing,” in Greenwood Heights in 2018.
Artist Statement
Formally and philosophically, my oil paintings explore the concept of nature as a gateway to understanding a greater reality, with multiple dimensions nested within one another. In depicting botanical life that is alternately sensuous and phenomenological, I aim to challenge prior assumptions about the vacuity represented by mere beauty in nature.
In some paintings, I depict a macroverse, blown up and extended to show structure, while at the same time describing what it means to see as a plant and move toward sunlight. My paintings of leaves are not meant to identify and aggrandize the leaves themselves, but to depict the light and the shapes dramatized in the interval of aesthetic recognition, creating either cold light with warm shadows, or vice versa, with the leaves actually stretching the light; and multiple dimensions reuniting as the narrated event returns to its representation.