GINA JELINSKI
about the artist
Gina is a writer, musician and archivist who over the past decade has been handling rare plant life and antiquarian books. Her work has been published for Modern Painter, Cabinet Magazine, The Center for the Art of Translation, 3AM Magazine, and The Analogue Preservation Network. She's exhibited for Camp X Copenhagen, SFAQ, Black Hole Cinema, Form Content (UK), MASS MOCA, Verge Gallery (Australia), Illuseum Berlin (Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 9), and The Belgium Anthology of Optimism at Centre d'Arts.
Previously her archival endeavors were held at the Luis Buñuel Film Institute, The Institute for Figuring, and USC Roski. She is the director and host at Hey, Venus! Radio, and a CalArts graduate.
an elaboration
Gina was born in the 1980’s on the umbilicus feather of a strawberry VCR -the daughter of a German guitarist and Italian piano player, who once ran a small video game shop in the San Fernando Valley. Gina spent her first few weeks of life in a glass incubator. Upon arriving home from the hospital, her doctors set up a video camera in order to document her development for the coming years. Soon after she became obsessed with documenting her every-day through tape recordings, journals, videos, and photographs.
She resides in a small castle in the sky with her cats Goethe and André Breton, Lola the pot-bellied pig, and a pair of toy poodles named Fox & Scully.
PORTFOLIO/PROJECTS
BEYOND THE MARGIN OF TIME: Intimate Morphologies of Plant Life, Botanical photography series. 5X7 Softcover, 110 pages, 168 photographs. Featuring all sorts of cheeky flowering sunbeams -wild, native or ‘becoming native’. “According to the Gaillardia, even the angiosperm get jealous of the orphaned natal plum. And the waxy, yet delirious, stamen of the Echinopsis spachiana casts its spell onto the honey bee. Willingly, I surrender to the behaviors behind each botanical specimen, as a moonbeam does the calypso in my subconscious. As our pollinators and habitats are threatened, and droughts permeate our counties, fire-season becomes the most unwanted holiday to date. I can only hope that I've illustrated these sacred dances between bumbling human being and enlightened flora, here in this tiny book.” English. Colour & Black and White. Signed Limited Edition.
THE NICOTINE PILLOW BOOK TAPES, An uncensored coming of age fairytale from an era where missing an episode of the X-Files, and the aftermath of 9/11 amidst a Cocteau Twins mix tape was the extent of your worries. Series chronicles the lives of six close friends, prior to social media's emergence; as they encounter love and experiment with hallucinogens. These mishaps take place between the years of 1999-2007, in and around the SFV, as well as a small town built on a landfill better known as Santa Clarita.
LETFOL -Sound Works, Recorded between 1999-2025 on analog equipment. Instruments include guitar, percussion, upright bass, harp, clarinet, violin, accordion, piano, and vocals.
HEY, VENUS! RADIO, Podcast. An analog sound collage chronicling epiphanies in music, literature, plant life—and everything in between. Each episode departs with a dialogue on such topics, and concludes with a curated playlist from the archive; featuring over an hour of tracks -from Shoegaze to Ethiopian funk, Czech rock & beyond.
IF I WERE BUT ILLUSION’S VOICE, 446 pp. Fiction. An erotic avant-garde novel about a playful group of outcasts who, through their studies in linguistics, spiral into a whirlwind; illuminating the rites of desire, poverty, and familial folly. When Nino, a thirty-something ornithologist, takes to living in her car after graduating from college, she is joined by her research partner to leave the life they know far behind them. After months of this new found freedom, gutter bathing became exhausting and insomnia had set in —the two women part ways. Nino serendipitously finds herself in an alternate universe, coincidentally in her old home town; one increasingly punctuated by a deserted Los Angeles and inhabited by exotic creatures of extraordinary exception -e.g., a fleet of Satyr Tragopans; a rare species of Himalayan bird that mysteriously shows up in the San Fernando Valley. Nino reluctantly continues her work as a dishwasher and unlicensed therapist for the locals, while discovering another unexpected species at a deli across from an abandoned male brothel— his name was Sydney; a spirited house cleaner, clock collector and underground deli-dancer. Little known to Nino at first, her muse resided on a homestead of which contained a body of water beneath the floorboards, offering a mysterious platform for all of their esoteric desires to land. Needless to say, the two join forces amidst the collapse of the internet and the pathetic social landscape they spent a lifetime avoiding.
LADY MOON VALLEY, Non-fiction video documentary series. Hi8/DV/8mm. 268 mins. A lucid portrait of a family which follows the unusual story of a woman named Sally; a self-taught multi-media artist and ancestress of Polish immigrants, pimps, and vaudevillians. Being raised amidst a poverty stricken Chicago in the 1930’s, our heroine reveals her mischievous perspectives through song and dance, and confessions on a tape recorder. Sally recollects her childhood encounters in butcher shops, her various lovers, the truth about her father, and her dozens of projects around the house. Although what is soon revealed is the fact that the her entire family also resides at this house, and their tales of hope and desperation become Sally’s story, too. Music by Beth Kleist, and VWC. Format: DVD NTSC.
ODPOLEDNE TV, a video series which reveals documentations of uncensored rituals, while proposing unconventional exercises for the olfactory senses. These pieces tend to vary in shape and smell, functioning as a bewildering platform for the documentary genre. Hi8/DV/8mm
FLIRTING WITH YOU BY THE CHRYSANTHEMUM, Photography series. Over the span of five years the artist conducted private case studies with individuals on the subjects of phobia, intimacy, and sites of trauma. Through these documents she would follow up with questions pertaining to their answers, and photograph the areas at which she would sit to read (and respond to) their correspondences. These images were shot on film, processed, and placed into the files with each individual case study. A sort of topography illustrating the deepest fears and desires of people in communities which are scattered about like memories.
INSTINCT AMONGST ANTIGONE, Photography series. Series of 66 portraits, landscapes, and self-portraits — spanning a 16 year period which documents intimate encounters with various individuals, and sites of particular importance.