Jenny Calivas: Self-Portraits While Buried
Thu, May 29
|Yancey Richardson
Jenny Calivas: Self-Portraits While Buried runs May 29 – July 3, 2025, at Yancey Richardson. A poetic meditation on body, land, and the radical act of disappearance.
Time & Location
May 29, 2025, 7:00 AM – Jul 03, 2025, 11:00 PM
Yancey Richardson, 525 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, USA
About the event
From May 29 to July 3, 2025, Yancey Richardson Gallery presents Self-Portraits While Buried, the debut solo exhibition of Jenny Calivas with the gallery. This powerful series merges analog photography with performance, offering deeply contemplative reflections on the body, the Earth, and the complex dynamics of visibility.
To create each photograph, Calivas buries herself—sometimes partially, sometimes nearly completely—beneath soil, grass, sand, and mud, relying on intuition rather than sight to trigger her camera’s shutter. The results are haunting, subtle, and transformative: fragments of flesh, glimpses of a hand, or a single shutter cable challenge our assumptions about what constitutes a portrait—and who gets to define it.
Exhibition highlights:
Analog large-format self-portraits created while physically buried in the landscape
A feminist reimagining of portraiture, land, and ownership
Experimental darkroom processes and performance-based image-making