Jen Bervin
Catharine Clark Gallery
A subtle question asks itself not in words but as a feeling, a disquiet amplified over time, when an artwork takes root in the mind and the imagination grasps a difficult lesson: that an ethics is forming inside an aesthetics. But walking away from Jen Bervin’s exhibition “Doing and Undoing,” I felt such a realization growing in me. Bervin has taken fragments of language that Emily Dickinson originally scrawled on small scraps of paper—sometimes just a single word—magnified them sixfold, then embroidered them with silver thread on fabric grounds made from cotton batting, muslin, and mull.