Jennifer Gradecki

Jennifer Gradecki was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As an undergraduate, she attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, earning a double major in Sculpture and Experimental Social Psychology and a minor in Art History, with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art. Gradecki earned her MFA in New Genres from UCLA in 2010.

Jennifer Gradecki

Statement

My artistic practice pulls from the histories, methodologies and values of both experimental psychology and art. The methods I employ include, but are not limited to: critical investigation, statistical analysis, data collection and literature review. These techniques are utilized in conjunction with traditional artistic techniques and modes of presentation. These include (but are not limited to): video, installation, sculpture and performance. My aim in attempting to integrate the social sciences and the field of art is to enable the viewer to experience meaningful connections between the ways of knowing in each of these spheres and the external world.

Artistic knowledge and scientific thought have both been defined as forms of autonomy that have resisted integration into everyday experience. The average person does not separate their understanding and use of scientific or artistic methods within their daily life, and the division is largely irrelevant to anyone other than established artists or professional scientists who have a stake in defending the separation. Human experience is imbued with both rationality and irrationality, both classical and romantic impulses. Our contemporary world is a product and mixture of both of these modes of thinking. Categorizing and separating out elements of nature and knowledge is something that we do to the world, not something that inherently exists in it. Creating these rigid divisions in the first place may have resulted in the loss of accessibility to knowledge, the loss of its significance to everyday life and also potentially, the loss of more complex and nuanced ways of modeling the world.

I aim to question easy distinctions between different, and supposedly contradictory, ways of knowing. I aim to balance ethical judgments and aesthetic experiences with cognitive rationality and empirical thought. I intend to highlight and dissolve rigid divisions between rationality and irrationality in order to gain relevance to everyday life and to seek out more complex and nuanced ways of knowing.