Silver Projects is pleased to present Manual, an exhibition of recent gelatin silver prints by Jenna Westra.

"There are bodies," she said, "where their fatty disposition is not pushed and manipulated. They've never been touched."

To see a body untouched brings honor to It.
Light

To not touch a body is to repress It.
Dark

From that vein, the ending, we move into its opposite: the artery, life.

To touch and to fill.

Sekula, writing in 1986, talks about the photographic body as being both honored and repressed.

Objects, to play with one another's verisimilitude, both honor the other and repress the other. The original image is captured, its likeness gained, but never will it be the same.

The photographs of Jenna Westra, developed by hand, intimidate and intimate their origins, becoming the Other's self.

–Alan Longino, September 2014

Jenna Westra, b. 1986 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City. She is the 2014 recipient of the Marian Netter Award from Hunter College. She holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge and is a current M.F.A. candidate at Hunter College where her thesis exhibition is forthcoming in May of 2015.