Greene Naftali is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Candy Jernigan (b. 1952 – 1991). This will be the artist’s first comprehensive show in New York City.

The exhibition at Greene Naftali focuses on the work Jernigan produced in the East Village during the late-1980s. After working as a set and costume designer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Jernigan moved to New York and became immersed in a community of writers, artists, musicians, and theater groups. Here she developed her working method of compulsively collecting ephemera and creating archival systems that catalogued these findings. Looking to the sidewalks of the East Village, then an epicenter of the crack epidemic, Jernigan found the source material for a body of documentary works including Found Dope and Found Dope 11. For the latter, the artist gathered 308 crack vials and organized them into a grid, with marginal notations describing the location from where they were found.

Jernigan’s drawings from this period frequently suggest the logic of a graph, visually plotting time and experience. The so-called “therapy drawings” diagram Jernigan’s 45-minute sessions with a therapist, denoting a color sample of the sofa, for example, the position of a Kleenex box, and weather patterns that suggest her mental landscape. In characteristic fashion Jernigan collected visual evidence, using a scientific method to draw out the affective registers of her life’s most mundane data.

Known for her meticulous documents of castoff items, Jernigan developed a unique style that is at once affectless and deeply sensitive. Jernigan’s drawings, collages, paintings, and sculptures charted her daily life and movements, elevating the banal into objects of indexical beauty. Homing in on what is otherwise overlooked, Jernigan created haunting records of places and the things that used to exist there.

Candy Jernigan (b.1952-1991) studied at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Dance Theater Workshop (1989 and 1985) and Lumen Travo (1987). Recent group exhibitions include Reckless Head, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2013); This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); Locations, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2011); The Pursuer, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2010); and Looking Back, White Columns Gallery, New York (2010).