Her daily web blog is collected into several volumes of hardcopy retro books where she records her daily exploits as a tattooist and bunn about town in stick figure, sketch diaries. This work has brought fans to her tattooing as well as dedication to her Myspace and Blogger posts. Her friends and other loved ones can enjoy their lovely Jenn in all too cute 2 dimensions as they love her in three.
In her comics she writes semi-autobiographical tales of surviving in the tricky, convoluted world of womanhood. Her observations are astute, uncanny and achingly, poignantly funny. She’s also pretty damn good at drawing them too. I love her women. They are as evocative & recognisable as they are individual.
Her art is provocatively sensual and confrontational, Her colour palette a visceral punch into the psyche feeding, feeding chromic appetite and provoking the viewer into a relationship with the visions of her women.
Her Disney triptych, for me, comments on the sexualising of ‘types’ of women – the ‘coquette’, the ‘exotic’, the ‘dangerous’. The portrayal is of a deep-rooted tradition of constrictive and didactic feminine sexual ideological dichotomy: on the one hand, stifling and controlling women as sexual beings and on the other, fetishising women into categories which also control and constrain for the pleasure of the viewer over that of the subject. Disney princesses, even the modern ones, are ‘types’ and while not overtly sexualised, are constrained in their visual roles with a bound-down sensuality. The dichotomy is complicated even more because of an inherent sexuality, which is convoluted by the portrayal of the princesses in Jennifer’s pictures: their poses are provocative, clichéd to their type, yet their expressions are troubled and vulnerable. She weaves the word ‘sex’ into two of the pictures. She tells me this is what the Disney artists did all the time. And sex is prevalent here: for the schoolgirl, a shadowy figure waits at the door; the witch’s familiar seems to be looking on with troubled judgement of her or her place; the ‘exotic’ princess is prone and ready for the object of her gaze. The situations are steeped in the ideologies of sex, making these depictions a complicated and uncomfortable one for the viewer.
A kick ass tattooist for SkinWerks Tattoo and Design in Carrollton, Georgia, USA, - if you're ever in her area and want ink under your skin, you could not go to a more dedicated or talented inker.
She rocks. She’s fab. I adore her.
(all images copyright Jennifer Young 2005, reproduced with kind permission of the artist)
http://theapprenticediaries.com
http://www.skinwerks.com