Bodies, Nobodies
Featuring work by: Amanda Hunter, Jenna Rothstein, Jodie Niss
MARCH 15 - APRIL 13, 2025
Opening Reception Saturday, March 15, 5-8 PM
Transmitter is pleased to present Bodies, Nobodies, a group exhibition exploring unexpected connections amongst the awkward and the mundane. The artists featured in this show – Amanda Hunter, Jodie Niss, and Jenna Rothstein – all work with found imagery to create images that, despite their lack of a human presence, are imbued with an absurd humanity. Internet searches, magazines, thrift stores, or photos that are buried in their camera rolls on their phones. The sources these artists use may be impersonal, but in the inclusion of these pictures to their paintings, each artist is able to evoke uncomfortably recognizable feelings.
Each artist arrives at their humanity in their own way. Amanda Hunter’s paintings and drawings celebrate incidental moments and the poetics of happenstance. Using the ephemera of photo scraps, she puzzles together images in search of new meaning through the slow action and discovery of painting. Jodie Niss uses references from the internet and print media that are at first sight mundane and unremarkable, but taken out of their original contexts and brought into high focus through the act of painting she creates an unsettling combination of the familiar and absurd. Seen as individual works or viewed as a pair, her paintings are able to heighten our sense of beauty, sexuality, fear, and loneliness. Jenna Rothstein’s paintings highlight vignettes of surprising, off-center and intimate moments. In stumbling upon her bizarre source imagery, her paintings become the material of a collective inside joke, oddities and absurdities captured in the act of painting. Her work is encased in bespoke, handmade sculptural frames made from cast plaster, ceramic, mosaic, and resin. Like the odd moments themselves, these sculptural frames underline the event and accessorize the joke. The human form is rarely present in the paintings of these three artists. Yet all three are able to manifest, if not the body itself, certainly the lived experience of one.
About the artist:
Amanda Hunter is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2014, she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Painting and a concentration in Art History. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Chautauqua School of Art (2012) and the Vermont Studio Center (2017). Her work has been exhibited in group shows across the United States.
Jenna Rothstein is a New York City-based artist, educator, and fabricator. She received my BFA from the University of Michigan in 2016 and her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in London, New York, Michigan, Florida, California, and Mexico City.
Jodie Niss is a working artist and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2008 and her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design with a minor in printmaking in 2004. Niss' work has been included in a variety of group shows including Mrs. Gallery, Maspeth, NY; Post Gallery Zurich, Switzerland; Fort Makers, Manhattan NY; Raw Meat publications, Brooklyn NY; Untitled Art Fair, Miami FL; and Honey Ramka, Brooklyn NY.