Artist Statement
In Go Deep Into the Woods, I use information gleaned from online communities to locate and photograph sites in public parks where men go seeking casual sex. In these lush settings, distinctions between what we consider public and private realms are blurred by the overgrowth, and nature becomes a complicit part of this taboo sexual activity.
Being a woman, I am an outsider to this subculture, and I approach the subject via the traces left behind. As a result, I depict these seductive landscapes in nuanced ways that invite dialogue about difficult and often unexamined issues, encouraging the viewer to engage imaginatively by filling in the gaps of my partial narratives. These images metaphorically suggest the complicated interplay between danger, secrecy, tenderness, voyeurism, and fantasy common to the broad spectrum of sexuality. In place of the idealized tameness typically associated with parks, I photograph nature as complex, beautiful, and strange, mirroring the activity that takes place there.
Jennifer Ray's work broadly takes on the relationships between humans and nature, examining the landscape as a refuge for marginalized behaviors and the destructive and symbiotic possibilities of human interaction with it.
Her work has been exhibited recently at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), the Chelsea Art Museum, RISD Museum of Art, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Hyde Park Art Center, as well as in solo showings at ACRE Projects and Morton College. It is included in The Collector's Guide to New Art Photography, published by Humble Arts Foundation, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the MoCP, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, and Hornswaggler Arts. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College and her BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College.
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