Elisa Jensen: Heart off Guard

Heart Off Guard brings together a selection of Jensen’s paintings made between 2008 and the present. The title of the exhibition is lifted from a poem by Seamus Heaney titled Postscript which describes a mundane scene - driving along the coast from one place to another - and being bowled over by the experience of light, water, sky, and movement; fleeting, uncontainable, momentary awe.

This sensation of being bowled over by the commonplace pervades Jensen’s paintings. The most recent works, all titled Riverview, are intimately scaled meditations on the passing of time outside a window. Each shows a similar view from the window of Jensen’s childhood home, observed as she was packing up her parents’ belongings after they passed. Her larger works, which include paintings of her young daughters exploring nature and common street scenes in Bushwick, present this sense of awe as all pervasive. The emotional tenor of these works is consistent - each scene is observed carefully with an eye to flickers of light, the passing of time, and the attempt to catch some small element of that surging feeling on the canvas.