Jana Brike
Sea of Change
November 1 – December 15, 2019
Sea of Change, Jana Brike’s most ambitious project to date, comprises a series of eight monumental paintings that explore the physical, emotional, and psychological milestones that commemorate the journey from girlhood to womanhood. The grand scale of the composition not only conjures a powerful intimacy between Brike’s subjects and the viewer, but her cinematic use of a panoramic format amplifies the paintings’ overarching narrative—and its insights into cultural notions of femininity, mortality, and the empowering might of collective engagement.
A procession of thirty-two life-sized female characters, embodying a broad spectrum of generations and ethnicities, are depicted marching together across the canvases. The artist situates her characters within a seascape narrative spanning from dawn to dusk—the cycle of a day, echoing the lifespan of a woman. The female figures in Sea of Change, some of which are self-portraits of the artist, are imbued with an autonomy that stands in stark contrast to the objectification of the female body predominantly found across the art historical canon.
The Sea of Change series, which occupied Brike for three years, is a lyrical meditation on what it means to be a woman in contemporary society. Cumulatively, the work references the captivating wave of empowerment that has recently galvanized women around the globe, in response to the current sociopolitical climate. While primarily celebratory in nature, Sea of Change serves also as a reckoning of sorts. Brike’s world is a space deliberately absent of men, and the artist has noted that the series’ narrative reflects the shifting sociopolitical landscape—especially regarding women and the environment—contemporaneous to the time that Sea of Change was conceived and developed. The configuration of multiethnic and intergenerational women across these eight panels celebrates the universality of the feminine experience, and echoes the solidarity among women in the era of the #MeToo movement and the proliferation of Women’s Marches around the world. The power of Brike’s all-female collective is reinforced by the artist’s deft use of the sea as a backdrop, and more specifically by the ebb and flow of breaking waves as a framing device. This conflation of the feminine experience and “mother” nature—in this case, the cyclical nature of the tide— is a nod to the philosophical tenets of Ecofeminism. Throughout the series, Brike seamlessly harnesses aspects of the natural world to reflect the inner life of her characters. Water is essential to sustain life, and in this context, it embodies the force and resilience of the feminine. It is endlessly shifting, and yet its variability is a constant and dependable force of nature.
-Excerpt from The Power of the Feminine In the Work of Jana Brike by Michelle Yun, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of Asia Society Museum
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Jana Brike was born in 1980 in Riga, Latvia and received her MA in painting from Art Academy of Latvia in 2005. Her artwork was first exhibited internationally in 1996, when she was still in her teens, and since then she has had 13 solo exhibitions and nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions throughout the world. The overarching theme of Brike’s work is the internal space and state of the human soul: its dreams, longing, love, pain—the vast range of emotions offered by the human condition—along with the transcendence of them all, the growing up and self-discovery. Her work is her poetic visual autobiography. Brike currently lives and works in Riga, Latvia. This is her first exhibition in Washington, DC.
