Interview with Jenna Totten

Jenna Totten is a painter from Mason Gross School of the Arts. This is our interview about her works, which can be found here.








J- In your work there is a lot of bodily mutation and mutilation. Who inspires your work?

T- call me a sick person but i enjoy mutilation and mutation, horror, gore so naturelly i ge inspired by horror films, No real artists in particular really. I look at Chet Zar, David Hartmen, and Stephen Gammel. but i feel i just really like their work and the subject matter more than using them for inspiration. but if i were to dig into my "psychy" a bit i struggled with my weight when i was younger so this hate for the pretty perfect human form kinda boiled, cooked,and fermented in my head for a while until it became something i enjoy seeing . being normal, seeing normal things are boring to me now.

J- Do you share the goals of these artists, or are you trying to represent a merging of

T- Since i dont really look to too many artists for inspiration i try to do my own thing based on random objects and concepts i come across and i mutilate them in my head and try to make it a visual reality in my work.


J- Do you want to modify the way that pop culture represents the bodily deformations in monsters? Do you feel that you are humanizing it or removing the disgust factor? More specifically, why do your works represent bodily horror with such fun interesting patterns and colors?

T-well i like said earlier springs from my younger years of being overweight and in my teen angst it kind of just developed into this horror-esk style of purples and neon greens and so on. because really i'm not all decay and grim misery i like color too. and the bright colors bring a sort of irony to my work thats kind of corky and funny.


J- Do you recreate the characters or modify their personality or do you use their existing images and associated connotations to formulate new meanings?

T- the last one, haha. i believe your talking about my series of horror film characters in the psychedelic background. those paintings were really just for fun and some what an experiment in creating my own kind of pop art if you will .


J-What attracts you to abstract backgrounds with detached heads? Is this a decapitation or simply a void in the figure ground relationship to create a floating effect?

T- honestly there is not pre-thinking to the pieces you are referring to. but i was playing with irony a bit but i believe that our minds are more powerful that we believe that our bodies are just a vessel sort to speak.