Jenny Lynn's Photography

A hand is shown to correspond to a foot, a plant to a phallus, a womb to a butterfly, a veiled head to a cloud.

Jenny Lynn's work is preturnaturally aware of the correspondences, oppositions, echoes and mazes that constitute our sense of visual reality. In the tradition of the Surrealists who've so inspired her, however, the occasional rhymes in her photographs are invariably oblique or inexact - the equivalent of slant rhymes in a poem.

Two contradictory impulses play themselves out in Ms. Lynn's oeuvre. There is her almost obsessively alert eye that instinctively locates, or else intentionally arranges these visual rhymes, and there is the dream landscape to which she surrenders her images. In that landscape, every solution becomes a mystery, and nothing can ultimately be controlled or reduced to exact linguistic expression. These antagonistic impulses create the exquisite tension in her work between the rational and unconscious, sensuality and isolation, order and chaos. Like a surrealist scavenger, like Dali, Magritte or Man Ray, she presents he paradoxes and symbols and then abandons them to their fate as icons of mystery.

It is understandable and perhaps inevitable that as Ms. Lynn's work developed and began exploring more abstract and complex dramas, her style became increasingly hybrid, often involving an intricate mix of painting and montage with photography. This outer tension of different methods and techniques makes an arresting analog to Ms. Lynn's contradictory subject matter. When Ms. Lynn's ambitious techniques and themes mesh, as they often do, her art is funny, precise, and deeply resonant, as if dream and reality had silently shaken hands and called a truce.

Jenny Lynn is one of a handful of photographers of her generation who has taught me things about the act of seeing and the things we see.

Richard Burgin
Author of The Spirit Returns, Private Fame, Fear of Blue Skies
Editor, Boulevard Magazine