Sun-Times Chicago, Friday, April 4, 1980
Wenger’s photos compel, repel Visceral. Tense. Threatening. Jane Wenger’s pictures bring it right to you. “It isn’t pretty work,” she admits. “It’s not meant to be.”
It’s meant instead to be compelling and repelling at the same time, to engage and fascinate even while it carries a lurking, gritty edge. Many of her images generate wildly conflicting impulses; what you see may not be pleasant, but you have to look. When Wenger hits a promising theme, she’s quite tenacious in pursuing it. “I have very few ideas,” she says. “I’m not one of those people who has 1,000 ideas and can’t wait to finish one before they go on to another. That’s not me. Instead, I develop an idea to the end, until I can’t stand it anymore—and in a way that’s an important part of the work.”
Immersed in fine arts as an undergraduate, she did graduate work in photography at the Institute of Design and at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus. She chose photography because there really was no choice to make. “From the moment I first picked up a camera,” she says with conviction, “I knew it was my tool.”
“The nature of photography is that it can be reproduced. That’s part of why I’m a photographer. If I did paintings, I’d never be able to give them up. But as a photographer, I still have prints of everything I’ve done that matters to me—and other people have them, too—so I never have to give them up.”
Like most serious artists, she is conscious of and concerned about her own personal history. In this respect, having access to all her old negatives is important. She sees her work as a process, one which she is constantly monitoring. But the process is not an easy one. “I’m not one of those people who loves what I do. I don’t think life is easy, and it’s not easy for me to do my work. In a lot of ways, I hate it—not the work itself, but the physicality of doing it and trying to make it work. It’s not fun.”
Just as many viewers are both attracted and repelled by Wenger’s work, she herself seems to be attracted and repelled By the process of doing it. But it should be no surprise to learn that plumbing the creative depths is likely to stir some waves. Putting a show together is another process that is both draining and exciting. Months can pass between the time she shoots her film and finally makes the prints, crops them, mounts them, and hangs the show.
She may not shoot much in the interim, but all the while, she is thinking—hard—about how the images should be handled. When a deadline is imminent, she goes into high gear to finalize the show—which isn’t complete in her mind until it’s hanging on the wall. She makes her black-and-white prints in various sizes to create pace, flow, and viewer involvement when the installation is complete. Her latest work can be seen at Landfall Press Gallery, 215 W. Superior, through April 29.