Jennifer Bornstein

The set in Jennifer Bornstein’s 16-mm abstract film Phantom Limb, 2009, is the same one used in the television show Boston Legal, but you’d never guess it. The eighteen-minute black-and-white work unfolds slowly and silently and ends where it began, with the opening scene flipped backward and in negative. Superimpositions and mirror reflections are spread throughout, in homage, perhaps, to early Surrealist film, and these transitions seem to suit her subject: mirror boxes, traditionally used to treat phantom-limb pains. Bornstein’s work feels a bit like therapy, too: As the camera’s roaming lens closely scans the floral wallpapered surfaces of the set through repetitive and hypnotic movements, it’s hard not to feel increasingly relaxed, or nearly numb. Even the whir of the projector seems to play a role. By the end of the film, when past and present collide, I felt an uncanny, pleasurable, and disorienting stupor.

“Evergreen,” a new series of photographs (her first exhibited in nearly ten years), offers another approach to feeling severed. Intrigued by the story of Treva Throneberry, who enrolled at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Washington, at age twenty-eight, in these works Bornstein captures dull teenagers amid their even duller academic surroundings. While the images do not seem to offer anything more than the current (and itself cyclic) milieu at the school or point to the elaborate masquerade that Throneberry created in the late 1990s, they do recall the slippery identity issues at play in Bornstein’s late-’90s portraits of herself with young boys. These would have been nice to see here too, in yet another kind of reflection.