Jen Aitken: Courtyard — BYODBYOS

More details on site-service.org

BYODBYOS
Bring Your Own Dril Bring Your Own Saw*
Disassembling the Courtyard

Join us on January 20 for the final public program of Jen Aitken: Courtyard, currently on view at Nine. Together, we’ll dismantle the courtyard built for the exhibition—inviting visitors to take part in its deconstruction and leave with a physical piece of the structure.
*No RSVP required.

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"Jen Aitken joined Service at Nine last December following a ten-hour drive from Toronto, beginning her At Service Residency working directly from the basement space toward Courtyard. She constructed two sawhorse tables and unpacked the ceramic elements that form her sculptures titled Dancers, using the gallery as a place to test, adjust, and respond. Through this hands-on process, she decided to build an environment for the collective works. A platform constructed at the center of the room invites movement rather than offering a single, fixed viewpoint…"
- Text by Seoyoung Kim

Full Press Release

About the artist:
Jen Aitken is based in Toronto, Canada. She makes sculptures that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She uses common industrial materials to create unidentifiable forms about intimacy, syntax, and bodily space. Aitken presented her first institutional solo show at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2023, titled The Same Thing Looks Different, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Her first large-scale public sculpture was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montreal, in 2023. She was commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, to create a site-specific installation for its 2020 Women to Watch exhibition. Aitken is represented by Trépanier Baer gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and her work is in public collections across Canada, including Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.