Catherine Jansen


Catherine Jansen is a photographer who has been active since the late 1960s. She is known for her unique style that merges technology with traditional photography.

Work

Soft sculpture

Cyanotype

In 1969 Jansen created the Soft Tea Set, a scaled to life, photographic, three-dimensional object using a formula of potassium ferrocyanide and citric acid, which she developed specifically for cloth material. Stitching the imaged fabric together and stuffing it, she was the first to use this photographic process in a sculptural format.
Jansen’s innovations with this blue print formula culminated in the first use of photography to create a scaled to life room environment using cyanotype on cloth. The Blue Room is part of the permanent collection at the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Color copier

Jansen was the first artist to extensively explore the potential of the electronic color copier process using electronically generated images that preceded the digital camera and computer technology. Her first scaled to life room environment using this process was The Bathroom with Satin Sink and Taffeta Toilet. This installation is part of the permanent collection at the Honolulu Museum of Art Museum in Hawaii.
This process using the color copier, the precursor to the digital age, evolved into the Soft House Project, a five-room scaled to life house environment, utilizing thousands of photographic images. While developing this protocol Jansen developed a method for photographing the figure full scale on cloth, as well as rendering three-dimensional objects on cloth. The life size portrait on cloth, Erika, is in the permanent collection at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.
Between 1971-1976 Jansen was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants to complete a scaled to life five room house using color copier technology.

Other photographic processes

In 1977 Jansen built a Kirlian photographic gold screen unit and spent several years exploring, generating, and utilizing Kirlian photography on cloth as a fine art expression.
In 1985, by photographing the same object from multiple vantage points and stitching layers of cloth together, she created a protocol for making a photographic image appear three-dimensional.
Throughout the 1990s Jansen was involved with the ongoing Thirsty River project, in which she utilized 77 yards of fabric strategically laid it out in the landscape to reflect the light of the rising sun. In the light of the sun the fabric takes on a new form and connects with the landscape. The River has been taken in a suitcase to dozens of countries on five continents.
In 1995 Jansen, with a team of students, created 75 costumes for the Copernicus Project. These innovative cloth costumes, also considered wearable sculpture, used photographic imagery to express content as well provide decorative elements They were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and are part of the permanent collection at the Michener Museum of Art.

Digital

From the late 1990s to today, Jansen has been working with a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop to create a visual vocabulary that builds photographs into a long format that can express psychological and emotional time and space within the image. This work has coincided with 15 trips to India, and is an ongoing project called The Nada Series.

Jansen presently lives in Wyncote, Pennsylvania and spends three and a half months out of every year in India. While there, she spends her time volunteering at Little Stars School for street children and orphans, as well as working on her Nada Series.

Education

Recognition

Grants and awards

  • 2003 - Professor Emeritus
  • 1999 - Cultural Incentive Grant
  • 1988 - Individual Artists Grant, Pennsylvania Council of the Arts
  • 1983 - Individual Artists Grant, National Endowment of the Arts
  • 1982 - Cultural Incentive Grant
  • 1981 - Individual Artist Grant, Pennsylvania Council of the Arts

Selected exhibitions

Individual

Group

  • 2009 -10 Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
  • 2009 -10 An Evolving Legacy, Twenty Years of Collecting, Michener ArtMuseum, Doylestown, PA
  • 2008 - Alternative Photography, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA
  • 2006 - Hololulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI
  • 2004 - Alternative Photographic Processes, Boston, MA
  • 2001 - Imaging the Inner Eye, Allens Lane Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
  • 2000 - Imaging the Inner Eye, Allens Lane Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
  • 1998 - Woodmere Art Museum, Germantown, PA
  • 1998 - Photographic Alternatives, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong
  • 1997 - Conspicuous Display, Rutgers University, Rutgers, NJ
  • 1996 - Bernice Steinbeckk Gallery, New York, NY

Collections

  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Michener Museum of Art, Doyelstown, PA
  • High Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI
  • Photographic Resource Center, Tucson, AZ
  • Michael Kohler Art Institute, Sheboygan, WI