Jennifer Caravella

Jennifer Caravella inhabits an ever shrinking bubble of sanity in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district, where she spends her time making artwork and concocting plans for world domination. Her latest creations tend to look like they were stitched together by the kind of doctor that operates in dirty motel rooms, and they fairly reek of BAD TIMES and DIRTY SEX. Woken up on many bathroom floors with your head bleeding and your wallet missing lately? Welcome to how Jen’s work makes me feel. Her earlier pieces weren’t this explicit, it was more like her swinging a big hammer at the last remnants of a 1950’s daydream that she never believed in, but it’s always been shot through with a deeply intuitive sense of internal symmetry that lets you know that even the accidents are tightly controlled around here.Jen tends to paint in bright colors, on big canvasses, and with the world’s most obsessive/compulsive collection of colored electrical tape. Her work is populated with bits of wire, ink ribbons, 45 rpm records, burnt cigarettes, bloody razors and needles, circuit boards, and sewing pins. All the junk that humans living in the 21st century seem to disregard like a pile of dead leaves filters down through Jen and finds itself pinned to her canvasses like butterflies killed for display. But don’t let the aforementioned description plant in your head the idea of a grubby, thrift store kind of mentality. One of Jen’s many hidden talents is the ability to take these disparate, decaying cultural artifacts, and tie them all together on a canvas in way that shows you how everything belongs to everything else. Her pieces give off the sensation of flying into clean airport runways at night and living in buildings made of flesh. It’s organic decay lashed to steel highway guardrails, and it’s moving all the time. Jen was a very active member of Suicidegirls.com until she recently archived herself due to the fucked up antics and lack of integrity behind it all (did I also mention that she’s Sicilian?). She authored what was possibly the most scatological, least practical advice column in the history of advice columnists. In addition to donating her pungent pearls of wisdom for the betterment of humankind, she also performed and toured with the website’s burlesque troupe, humorously reinterpreting the torture scene from “Reservoir Dogs” and turning the Pixies’ “Tame” into a violent, psychotic exorcism that still manages to warm the ol’ cockles.But lets forget the whole scatological advice columnist/Pop Art Frankenstein angle for a second, and lets look at a little girl born and raised in California’s receding hairline hippie dream/organic ponytail co-op/homeopathic feminist free-floating existence. Her best friend’s name was Nanu for Christ’s sake. Channeling the spirit of her wild, legendary great uncle, Louis Prima, she peed on skylights, pulled an elaborate Girl Scout cookie scam at the age of eight, and was routinely picked up by the police for being terminally unsupervised and permanently out of bounds. Which is what I love about Jen: faced with a cloud full of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and fascistic liberal feel-good propaganda, this girl has always gotten dirty in order to spare herself from becoming just like YOU! Blood, piss, and sweat has rarely looked this good. Did I mention that she was conceived on an acid trip?DANIEL POWELL MyGen Profile Generator