Vesna Jovanovic

Field Anatomy

November 2, 2019 - January 18, 2020
Opening reception November 1, 6 - 9 pm
Artist talk January 18, 3 pm

OS Projects presents Vesna Jovanovic: Field Anatomy, opening November 2, 2019 and continuing through January 18, 2020.  An artist reception will take place on Friday, November 1, from 6 – 9 pm.

Vesna Jovanovic’s projects focus on aspects of the lived body that can be neither observed nor measured objectively—relational qualities like empathy, intimacy and kinship.  Her works on paper combine surgical case studies with unpredictable forms arising from chance operations such as spilled ink, rotated cutouts and masking techniques.  This approach leads to a different kind of medical illustration: one that emphasizes context, fluidity, difference and humor and views bodies not as vessels or machines but as individuals with embodied lives.

Field Anatomy charts the course of Jovanovic’s primary practice over a period of 15 years, beginning with a 2002 piece that uses spilled ink on paper as a springboard for drawing and a method for relinquishing control.  As her drawings unfold over the ensuing years, they become increasingly organic and anatomical, and their focus expands to include architectural, environmental and interspecific contexts.

Jovanovic’s embrace of alternative representations to the scientifically objectified body is best exemplified by her series of 80” x 60” ink and graphite drawings on polypropylene, four of which are included in the exhibit. These works, created between 2013 and 2017, reference medical illustration while depicting various objects (prosthetic heart valves, aspirated food) that find their way inside the body for surgical, aesthetic or accidental reasons. By foregrounding the permeability and vulnerability of the human body, Jovanovic asks viewers to consider where—or even whether—to place boundaries between ourselves and our surroundings, both natural and constructed.

About the Artist

Vesna Jovanovic is a visual artist whose work focuses on embodiment, biopolitics, posthumanism, phenomenology and related bodily subjects.  She has worked in various disciplines throughout her career, most recently drawing, painting and installation.

Jovanovic is the recipient of an Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, a Ucross Foundation Fellowship, and many other grants and awards including residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, MASS MoCA, VCCA France and the International Museum of Surgical Science.  Her artwork has been exhibited at venues throughout the country, including the Gordon Center for Integrative Science at the University of Chicago, Haggerty Art Gallery at the University of Dallas, Hyde Park Art Center, The International Museum of Surgical Science, Slow Gallery in Chicago and Chashama Gallery in New York.  Her work is in the permanent art collections of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, International Museum of Surgical Science and the Koehnline Museum of Art.

Born in Chicago to immigrant parents, Jovanovic spent most of her childhood in the former Yugoslavia. She has a BA in Fine Arts (with an emphasis in Ceramics) and a BS in Chemistry from Loyola University Chicago. After graduation, she worked in a R&D laboratory while attending The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received a BFA in Studio Art. She also holds an MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University.

Installation Images

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