Jennifer May Reiland works between New York City and Palma de Mallorca. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (NYC), Open Sessions at The Drawing Center (NYC), Queens Museum (NYC), and the Fondation des États-Unis at Cité Universitaire (Paris).
She has shown her work internationally, including at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Drawing Center, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin. She has had solo shows at Galeria Enrique Guerrero (Mexico City) and at Lawndale Art Center (Houston).
Jennifer May Reiland’s practice is primarily based in drawing. She creates narratives originating in historical research which explore themes of apocalypse, martyrdom, and erotic obsession. A personal symbology runs through her work, envisioning a world which combines alligators, gothic cathedrals, bulls, and virgins. Having grown up on the Gulf of Mexico, she incorporates the religious education of her childhood with the animals, plants, and architecture of the region. Narratives of physical sacrifice are a frequent theme, uniting the lives of animals, men, and women.
Her work is inspired by the arts of Middle Ages, particularly miniatures created by artisans as objects of personal devotion for particular patrons. Like these artisans, her work incorporates spiritual, historical, and personal themes, often juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, the vulgar and the sublime, the contemporary and the ancient. Many of her works function as hagiographies for women whose lives made them infamous and whose deaths made them into secular martyrs, drawing both from the deep past and from contemporary pop culture. Her contemporary narratives incorporate the female martyr archetype originating in the Middle Ages about women who transmuted histories of suffering into spiritual power.