Jen Mazza
March 11, 2025

“Ethics and aesthetics are one” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. —Iris Murdoch

Jen Mazza is an artist of deep and focused attention. Her meticulously rendered paintings and drawings re-present artifacts of art historical, scientific, and cultural interest. She takes extreme care to reproduce the physical qualities of the objects she reproduces, sometimes using 20-30 colors to match just the right tone and brightness of a sheet of paper.

Mazza brings this same focus to the playlist she made for The Selection Committee, composed of songs that require serious listening—from Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell to Julius Eastman and Morton Feldman.

We begin our discussion of her recent exhibition “Vicissitudes of Nature” at Ulterior Gallery in New York City, by looking at her painting “Portent.” It’s a rippling, dizzying rectangle of thalassic movement composed almost entirely of undulating lines with a tiny city in the far distance. This roiling composition is a reproduction of one of the twelve panels in Titian’s woodblock print “The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea”. Her focus on the most abstract of the panels connects to her search for how to represent attention, nature, and the sublime today. We discuss the Caspar David Friedrich show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and how he and the Romantic painters taught us how to look at nature. She also explains how drag artist John Kelly taught her how to show up as an artist.

Finally, we discuss Mazza’s interests in philosophy and literature in a conversation ranging from Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch to Annie Dillard and Jorge Luis Borges. All in all it’s a lively chat about art, music, and life!

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Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.

1. Feeling Good, Nina Simone, 1965
   
2. In the Morning, Nina Simone, 1969
   
3. I Shall Be Released, Nina Simone, 1969
   
4. Woodstock, Joni Mitchell, 1970
   
5. Joni Mitchell’s Blue (bootleg), John Kelly 
   
6. A Chloris: "S'il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m'aimes" (Très lent), Reynaldo Hahn, Philippe Jaroussky, Jerome Ducros, 2012
   
7. 3 Gymnopédies: No. 1, Lent et douloureux, Erik Satie, Pascal Rogé, 1984
   
8. The Long Ride II, Devonté Hynes, 2020
   
9. Evil Nigger, Julius Eastman, Wild Up, Christopher Rountree, Devonté Hynes, Adam Tendler, Lewis Pesacov, 2023
   
10. Sonatas XIV and XV, 'Gemini' - After the Work of Richard Lippold, John Cage, Adam Tendler, 2008
11. Rothko Chapel 5, Morton Feldman, 1991
    
12. Flowers for Prashant, Tyshawn Sorey, 2017    
    
13. Tiger Balm, Annea Lockwood, 2007

Jen Mazza (b. 1972, Washington D.C.) received an M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2001 and is currently based in New York, NY. A committed educator, as well as an avid thinker and writer, Mazza draws her inspiration across a range of disciplines which include philosophy, literature, and visual culture. Her work has been recently exhibited in a mid-career retrospective at The James Gallery at the Center for the Humanities, in a digital project for Artist Alliance Inc., and as part of her recent talk on art and nature at the Getty Museum. Mazza’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, and Hyperallergic.