Working deftly across mediums and formats, Malia Jensen draws on the natural world for primary protagonists for her sculptures, videos, photographs, and works on paper. With great attention to the formal qualities of each of the materials she uses—including bronze, clay, carved soap and salt —Jensen creates works invested with human emotion and, as she describes, a quest for redemption: “There’s a deep sadness within a lot of the work which I hope to both excavate and transform."
Based in Portland, OR, Jensen has been awarded residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Portland Garment Factory, among others. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Portland Art Museum, Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, Wieden + Kennedy, Schneider Museum of Art, 21C Museum & Hotels, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and Wake Forest University.
Catharine Clark Gallery featured a special Media Room presentation of Malia Jensen’s video Worth Your Salt (2019) from her Nearer Nature project in conjunction with Laurel Roth Hope’s solo exhibition Accelerating Impact in 2022. For this multi-year endeavor, Jensen first carved a series of six sculptures from livestock salt-licks; a hand holding a plum, a head resembling Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse, a breast, a dozen donuts (standing in for the stomach) and a foot. Jensen then installed the sculptures in wild spaces across the state of Oregon, using motion-triggered cameras to document animal interactions and the surrounding landscape over the span of a year. The resulting six-hour video work, edited from thousands of 30-second clips into a surveillance style grid, humorously and poetically offers us insights into the rhythms of the natural world and our place within it. Malia Jensen's work is currently available through gallery's art boutique EXiT.
