Jamie Kruse
Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and Assistant Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design (New York, NY). In 2005 she co-founded smudge studio, with Elizabeth Ellsworth, based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The New School Green Fund (Office of Sustainability, The New School); New York State Council for the Arts (2010, 2011) and the Brooklyn Arts Council. She has exhibited and presented her work both nationally and internationally. In the spring of 2014 she was a guest researcher for Future North (AHO Oslo). She is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog, (fopnews.wordpress.com) and has co-edited a collection of essays with Elizabeth Ellsworth entitled, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (punctum books, 2012).
smudge studio | a collaboration between Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
Our media include photography, performative research, multiples, installation and micro-productions. We use these media to connect daily life experiences to vast, generative forces of cosmological change. We take this to be a vital aesthetic-ecological act.
In the midst of the massive and disorienting changes that are altering our own species’ habitat, we slow and pause to perform local, ephemeral, unrepeatable acts of aesthetic hospitality, and invite audiences to pay close attention to the ever-shifting and impermanent conditions of life on Earth. Our works enframe seemingly commonplace activities of everyday life (the drinking of tea, the awareness of sunlight) within perspectives on time, landscape, and interactivity that are geologic in scale. By offering embodied experiences of the Anthropocene nested within the cosmological, we aim to deepen collective abilities to re-scale human expectations of stability and predictability, without sinking into distraction or despair, and to creatively inhabit Earth’s ever-changing conditions.
smudge is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild and selected work (2007- present) is archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.
Website:
https://smudgestudio.org