For his new exhibition Immortality Project I at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore, sculptor Sam Jinks develops his interrogation of the human condition through Ernest Becker’s seminal text The Denial of Death. Becker’s concept of “the immortality project” is one in which the individual focuses on the symbolic self, generating a personal belief system that seeks to be part of something that won’t die with the physical body – something eternal. This sets up the basic duality of humanness that exists between the physical world and the symbolic world of meaning. Jinks’ own personal immortality project features three new works. One is a representation of his wife Emma as Medusa, titled Untitled (Medusa), with a tangle of snakes in her hair, oversized and commanding. Another work (Carcass Bearer) is a man bearing a lamb’s carcass across his shoulders, depicting a connection we all have to our bodies and to mortality. The final piece (Reunion) is a pair of identical women embracing one another. Here Jinks invites the viewer to look directly into the face of a human connection that transcends the physical, but is excruciatingly mortal in its essence – an exercise in facing duality.
Jinks has exhibited in a number of national and international exhibitions and events, including Reshaped Reality, a traveling exhibition at Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishok, Denmark; True to Life, Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt and Landesmuseum, Hannover (2015-16); In The Flesh, National Portrait Gallery (2014-5), Canberra; All (is) Vanity, Seoul Museum, Korea; Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence – a collateral event of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Art Stage Singapore (2013); Animal/Human, the University of Queensland Art Museum (2012); and the survey exhibition Sam Jinks: Body in Time, Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria (2012).
