Exhibition at The James Gallery, December 2025-March 2026

Reviewed by Martha Schwendener, New York Times, January 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/arts/art-gallery-shows-to-see-in-january.html

and Rachel Stevens, Millenium Film Journal, April 2026

https://millenniumfilmjournal.com/product/mfj-83/

How does artistic practice approach the unnerving “not-knowing” of research? This may be a physicist’s search for audio frequencies in space, or attempts to make images of the stratosphere with a pinhole camera. Jenny Perlin (b.1970, Massachusetts) explores such questions through rayographs, 16mm film, hand-drawn animation, video, and sound.

This exhibition will present fourteen of Perlin’s drawings, photographs, and films displayed on monitors and in large-scale projections and additional evening screenings. Her documentary subjects include scientists at work near the Arctic Circle (Experiments, 2025); the aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who in 1793 undertook the first manned balloon flight in the United States (A Landing, 2025); and men who live off the grid in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos in preparation for catastrophe (Bunker, 2019). Lumiere (2024) is the image resulting from Perlin sending a pinhole camera to the stratosphere.

Steeped in art history and literature, drawing on structuralist film as well as fantastical literary voyages, Perlin plumbs the extreme lengths humans go in exploration to gather facts and data. These quests inevitably turn toward the poetic, the absurd, and the fallibility of human creative pursuit and inquiry, thus producing extraordinary and unexpected insights.

All images copyright Jenny Perlin 2026