Artist Statement

Jennifer Laiwint is a Canadian visual artist working across the disciplines of photography, video, installation and socially engaged performance. Her practice is preoccupied with psychologically charged subject matter, using constructed imagery and staged narratives to navigate lines between truth and fiction.

Jennifer’s current work explores the trust we put into healers and experts who promise easy transformation and what that can reveal about how we perform and articulate selfhood. By staging and filming “private,” self-help style sessions on relaxation and fear, she explores what might transpire when bringing the project of self-help into a constructed, relational space and questions whether an authentic transformation can occur. Through the process of collecting and coalescing these disparate experiences Jennifer aims to create a narrative-based, dialogical exchange between different participants and asks how we perform and articulate the aspirational self, the isolated self and the autonomous self.