For many years I have utilized local craft and hardware stores, every day and readily available materials along with the creative waste materials generated by the making of unknown things discovered in dumpsters to construct my works of art. Found surfaces, repetitive patterns and designs are common in my work: shapes, often fashioned by CNC tools and computers, embody the cold precision of technology and the grid that then become faltering, vulnerable forms separated from their intended use and subsequently thrown away. I recognize these materials as imperfectly beautiful, embodying an awkward abstraction. Repurposing these objects results in an acceptance of their and my cumbersome existence. I seek out the hidden patterns that determine, chart and map our everyday existence, the dialogues that exist within the between spaces of our being.

The work in this exhibition spans a little over two and a half years. Not a long time, except for the historical occurrences that transpired. Pieces from three bodies of work form this exhibition, Love in the Time of Counting, Infinite Polygon and Travel Diaries. The Love in the Time of Counting series was produced in a borrowed studio while sheltering in place during the height of the Pandemic through the summer and fall of 2020. Infinite Polygon began in 2021, after moving and relocating to a new studio space. An infinite polygon can look like a circle but only by visualizing geometry because it is not a circle. An infinite polygon is formed through countable infinite edges, unlike a circle it cannot enclose itself. Travel Diaries originated while on a Fulbright to India. I brought pieces of rice paper with random and basic iconic shapes printed upon them. Over a six-month period, these became over 100 drawings. They reflect a non-serial approach of an unbound sketchbook that was formed by working while waiting to visit with an artist, or attend a lecture, or in a hotel, or riding on a train. These works represent the series they are derived from. There are no literary or diaristic references in them, rather they are consciously sifted impressions and responses from a pure place of feeling. They are my filtered bridges between two times and two countries, conceived while encountering the paradoxes, contradictions, and complexities that arise from stumbling upon unfamiliar things, traversing unknown places, and experiencing other ways of being.

Anita Jung is a professor at the University of Iowa. She previously taught printmaking, drawing and installation courses at Illinois State University, Ohio University and University of Tennessee. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Arizona State University, where she majored in painting and drawing. The Master of Fine Arts was awarded to her from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the graphic arts. Over a thirty-year career her artwork has been curated into hundreds of solo, group and juried exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. She has given numerous lectures at conferences, universities, art and community centers. She was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru in 2022 as an Academic and Professional Excellence Scholar to research and film a video regarding contemporary printmaking in India.