Jennifer Pastor

Pastor’s work has been described to play with the connection between the piece and the observer, making the observer hyper aware of their presence. Her sculptures including The Perfect Ride (2003), Dead Landscape (2009–2010), and Endless Arena (2013) are some examples of the connection made by Pastor between the piece and viewer. Her mediums range from animation to steel, and allow a mingling of the materials in a certain space.

The Perfect Ride is a three part installation featuring a large, luminescent sculpture inspired by the Hoover Dam’s water circulation system, along a magnified sculptural rendering of the human inner and outer ear based on Pastor’s memory of a model in a medical museum. The third part is a projected line drawn-animation of a cowboy performing an impossible, but what would otherwise be a perfect rodeo ride on a bull. The ideas behind the work are about balance and circulation, and how various organizing “armatures” direct systems of movement. The exhibition examines human’s ability to triumph over nature and it exemplifies Pastor’s extensive research on structures of movement. Pastor has explained that her fascination for rodeo competitions grew from “trying to learn the aesthetic language, or system, that everyone in the rodeo seems instinctively attuned to”.

Pastor has exhibited in numerous museums including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Pastor was included in the 1996 Sao Paulo Biennial, the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Pastor has participated in a number of group exhibitions through the years, from 1993 to 2015. These group exhibitions have been featured in various countries such as France, Brazil, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.K., and Korea, along with numerous states in the U.S.

Pastor was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and went on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1992.

Jennifer Pastor (born 1966) is an American sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California Irvine. Pastor examines issues of space encompassing structure, body and object orientations, imaginary forms, narrative and progressions of sequence.