Work Samples
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"Invisible Museums of the Unseen"
GPS-based, user-activated audio art
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Commission
November 7, 2020 – May 15, 2021
Platform: Gesso.app
Sites, Chicago, IL:
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Invisible Museum of Sound waves in Winnemac Park
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Invisible Museum of Gravity in Lincoln Park
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Invisible Museum of Air in Washington Park
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Invisible Museum of Reflections in Douglass Park
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GPS-activated, self-directed interactive public audio art piece. Participants' movements activate the app-based GPS-triggered audio to play, which causes an invisible museum to come to life before them. This work takes the form of a fictitious audio museum guide for unseen architecture dedicated to invisible forces. Occurring in four parks throughout Chicago, participants discover two realms of the invisible: the architecture of an imaginary museum and the contents of the museum’s unseen “galleries,” each dedicated to a scientific and perceptual component of invisibility. This public audio art experience commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for its exhibition "The Long Dream."
"Bottling the Impossible"
Sculptures and Performance Series
High Concept Laboratories, Chicago
June 6-15, 2019
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Sculptures: As Andrews unveils her 'impossible perfume bottle' sculptures, they evoke images of a ship in a bottle, on magical steroids. Bottles contain totally solid objects such as a chess pieces and pocket mirrors, that are far larger than the neck of the bottle. Both the bottle, and the items inside, have not been cut, tampered with, or 3-D printed in anyway. The items inside are totally solid, and everything is exactly as it appears. The bottles function as a modern day magic wand.
For more on these, please read the Chicago Magazine feature article HERE
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Performances: What if a scent could create magic...? Aromas trapped in impossible perfume bottle sculptures cause the seemingly impossible to unfold in viewers' hands. This is an interactive, contemporary magic performance, with a contemplative edge where participants explore perception, time, and chance and the biological triggering of wonder. Subverting the traditional role of the magician, members of the audience are able to seemingly read Jeanette's mind, perform card tricks on themselves without knowing how, predict future decisions of other audience members and cause a water to transform into any perfume that their heart desires....
Please bear in mind that as a medium, magic does not translate to the moving image.
Can only be experienced correctly live.
“Invisible Roses”
Performance Series
8 performances, 22 minutes each
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Commission
October 21, 2017
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Participants locate a hidden performance via maps in invisible ink revealed via rose petals. During the performance, fabric is cut and magically restores itself and a rose is destroyed yet comes back to life.
For this work, Andrews returned to the Museum of Contemporary Art with a site-specific performance exploring concepts of certainty and being hidden in plain sight. Responding to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fabric wrapping of the MCA’s building in 1969, Andrews’ series of mysterious installations and interactive performances serve as a celebration of the museum’s future. Handed a map to the performance, museum patrons unfold the paper, noting it is blank other than a simple instruction to “locate roses.” They begin a sort of scavenger hunt in the museum, with fresh sod squishing underfoot welcoming them to a display of a thousand roses…. those rose petals unlock the real, previously invisible map to the performance. During the course of the work, sensory illusionist and magician Jeanette Andrews leads the audience in a series of illusions, magic, experiments. The scent of wet dirt imbues audience members with the ability to discern the color of a playing card simply by feeling it. Each viewer causes printed images to vanish and reappear.
At the conclusion of the work, Andrews slowly unfurls a large pile of cloth, which was seen to be concealing a single rose in a vase. She snaps the head off of the vase and crushes the petals in her fingers. The 30 foot length of cloth is then given to two women in the audience who cut in half, tie the pieces together, and then it is instantly and magically restored in their hands. It is then seen that the head of the rose has surprisingly grown back in mere minutes.