From pop hits to the sculptures exhibited at the Biennale. The American star unveils a creative rebirth between nature and science in Venice
There is an exhibition not to be missed in Venice. AND Matriclysm: An Archeology of Lost Connections scheduled until November 22nd at the Salone Verde art & social club on calle Regina on the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. At the center is the multidisciplinary work of Jewel, the American singer-songwriter who revolutionized the world of music at the end of the nineties first with Pieces of you, one of the best-selling debuts of all time, which went 12 times platinum; then with over 3 million records of Spirit. Raised in a peculiar family to say the least – her father, Atz Kilcher, was the protagonist of the reality show Alaska: The Last Frontier broadcast on Discovery between 2011 and 2022; her mother, Lenedra Carroll, however, after abandoning her, reconnects with her to act as her manager, stealing 100 million dollars from her, Jewel has made art her catharsis. An approach to creativity, which ranges from music to literature through art in its various disciplines, and which is told today for the first time in Europe in a unique visual journey. Created in tandem with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the curatorship of Joe Thompson, Matriclysm: An Archeology of Lost Connections it amazes both for the variety and for how the artist’s personal experience is the inspiration, but never the cause of the project. We meet Jewel in the shadow of First Motherthe jute thread sculpture created with the Congolese artist Patrick Bongoy, which is set up outdoors, suffers from bad weather, deteriorates and changes appearance day after day. «My art always consists in reworking my psychology. It’s always a topic that I’m reflecting on, that interests me and that I’m trying to come to terms with. And so my art helps me do that. It’s a bit like metabolising”, he tells us, “I question myself on many topics and here in particular on how I feed myself. That is, how many things have I called nourishment when, in reality, they were poison? How many times have I been in a toxic relationship that I called love? A poisonous thought that I fed myself every day? What was it about my childhood that led me to mistake poison for nourishment? How can this aspect be re-educated? How do you recognize something more nutritious? How do I connect to myself in a healthy way? How do I connect to my community or the earth in a healthy way? The exhibition examines precisely this, how were we taught to be women in different eras?”. The result is an excursus through the image of women as a symbol, from Henrietta Lacks to Mileva Maric, wife of Albert Einstein, but also as an expectation and reflection of contemporary life. In the middle, Seven Sisters, the installation dedicated to the constellation of the Pleiades, «I asked NASA for the data and at Berkeley I wanted to translate the language of the stars», he continues while blown glass spheres tell the melody of the sky with the sounds of the wavelengths of light, «when I enter a new space I don’t feel like expecting anything, but I just want to learn. This was also the case with the art community. I was lucky: many artists, but also galleries, took me under their wing. I think especially of Crystal Bridges, which allowed me to feel comfortable, meet people, understand the business and express myself. Coming from music was not a limit nor a chapter of the past. In fact, I continue to compose, I just released the single Upon Meeting the Goddess of Love and I’m thinking of an acoustic album.” Furthermore, next Friday 8 October, Jewel will once again be in Venice as the protagonist of a talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine gallery in London. We arrive in the last room in the last room, perhaps the most evocative one with Heart of the Oceana two and a half meter high sculpture that transforms ocean data into a visual and sound spectacle that reflects the instability of the sea: to create it, the artist collected ocean data, from temperature to wave activity, and combined it with musical algorithms created by herself in a twelve-minute landscape that gives voice to the Atlantic. «It is a sculpture, but also a scientific instrument, the only one that I know of that uses real data. But it is also an immersive experience, which develops in four phases, starting from the surface to reach the bottom of the sea and then going back up. The entire work is driven by data: I assigned a color, a sound, a position and a specific function to every single piece of data. It is therefore an extremely coherent language: the more time you spend with this work, the more you learn to understand what it communicates”, concludes Jewel.
