Anita Jung
Anita Jung's art projects center on the transformative beauty found within discarded materials like the remnants from CNC projects; her work emerges from repurposed surfaces that feature open-ended, awkward abstractions made from craft store materials and everyday ephemera. Jung's creations contemplate silence, edges, and the space between existence and nothingness, conveying a sense of impermanence and transition. Guided by open-ended methods, such as seeking and foraging, she also deliberately engages with computerized technologies offset through tactile analog methods, including crafting pigment with plant-based dyes and inks. She sidesteps the explicit intentions of these elements through this intuitive approach that propels her toward a futuristic nostalgia, generating paradoxical, transcendent, and metaphysical dialogues. Jung explores found surfaces as hybrid printing plates, creating layered introspections. These images record the transition from binary codes, seeking hidden patterns that define daily existence. Inspired by Buddhist understanding, Jung navigates the spaces between constructs and concepts of being.
During her Fulbright Fellowship in 2022, Jung shifted from literary references to consciously sifted impressions, capturing complex contradictions in unfamiliar landscapes. Her work invites the contemplation of beauty within the rejected and discarded, reflecting a continuous exploration of reuse and challenging connections.
A prolific artist, Jung’s work has been exhibited broadly and is housed nationally and internationally in numerous public and private collections. She is the recipient of a 2024 MI-LAB International Artist in Residence; a 2023/24 Iowa Art Council Art Project Grant; a 2023/24 IFPDA Foundation Grant; a 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award and Fellowship.
A few of her recent exhibitions include Hybridity, Olson-Larson Galleries, Des Moines, Iowa, 2024; IPEP Decade Show, Bihar Museum, Patna, India, 2023; The Disappearing Birds of North America: 389 Birds on the Verge of Extinction, https://www.disappearingbirds.org, 2023; Peregrinations: New Work, Hudson River Gallery, Coralville, Iowa, 2023; Travel Diaries, Gallery White, Vadodara, Gujarat, India, 2022; Thinking of Place iii, an international traveling exhibition to Guam, Argentina, Ireland, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia and the USA 2021-23.
Jung received a BFA in Painting & Drawing from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
- Printmaking