Jamie Winn, "Mechanical Menagerie"

Jamie Winn, “Mechanical Menagerie” Opening Event with the artist: Saturday, July 10th, 2-6pm Haven Gallery is pleased to present New Orleans based Jamie Winn for her first solo show “Mechanical Menagerie” at the gallery. “Mechanical Menagerie” features twelve automata (moving art) or dioramic sculptures depicting animals during their nocturnal outings as they fly, hunt and leap throughout nightfall. Winn’s sculptures are whimsically narrative and invite the viewer to take part in the often private meanderings of furry and feathered beings. Each sculpture combines the artists realist watercolor technique with her inventive engineering of gears, pulleys and belts, to make animated stories that mimic the natural movements of her animal sitters. Winn combines these practical applications of the animal kingdom with spooky aesthetics as graveyards and lonesome homes to create a surrealist play on storytelling. ABOUT JAMIE WINN Jamie Winn is a painter and accomplished tattoo artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her striking mixed media automata pieces combine crank shafts and customized light sources into multilayered watercolor paintings on wood. Winn’s macabre style resonates with a wide range of influences including traditional tattooing, principles of animism, vintage aesthetic, magical realism, Louisiana culture, as well as her family lineage of engineers and clockmakers. Her narrative work is both eerie and humorous, often reanimating deceased creatures, portraying vulnerable animals exploring the night, mischievous sheet-covered ghosts haunting abandoned houses, melancholy maidens of the age of spiritualism, and undead skeletons ringing their own coffin bells. Jamie Winn’s work is a harmonic celebration of mechanics, mortality, the supernatural, beauty, tragedy, and storytelling. In her own words, it is “a reminder of just how strange the world can get”.