smoke the moon presents My Fall: a solo presentation of new work by Maren Jensen. The artist’s solo show presents a collection of wall-oriented sculptural pieces. My Fall is a gravitational display—things collide, attentions split, the earth lifts toward an unknown vantage. Poking through the gaps in descent, each piece in Jensen’s show emerges in an orbit of conspiratorial longing. Her work stretches between and against itself and the other, patterning a different sort of focus. 

My Fall finds its home in the slippage between two forms of attention. The work in My Fall unravels a visual codex of estranged movement and hyper-intimacies. Many of the repeating motifs in Jensen’s show come from aerial views of clover highways balanced against street memorabilia she finds on walks around her neighborhood. Within these two opposing modes, My Fall emerges as a strange beacon—equally comfortable with alienation (highways: the ubiquity and abstraction of American car travel, moving without decision) and obsession (trash: discarded found objects that become totemic figures, being stopped in your tracks). 

Jensen’s work is a collision of choreographic moves. The speed of the highway both sanctifies and cancels the ground; a proliferation of collectivized movement against the individual. Walking is the opposite, it venerates the ground until it is in little pieces. To walk in a way that is not pure, that may only lead you back to where you began. Objects emerge in the pieces of the street, eliciting affection and attention, the chance to let yourself be stopped in your tracks by the remnants of another (time, version, person). Jensen’s work is not lost by these dual speeds. Rather, the artist finds a precarious beauty working within tension: constraint and limitation produce lionized forms. 

It is as if all the different materials in the show could have started from the same remote origin point. Plasma-cut steel, found and cut wooden forms, and linen wrapped wall hanging works punctuate the space. Linens and papers appear most often as surfaces, dyed and patchworked with deeply hued gem tones. Color and material collide in this show to create an aura of minerality, as if each piece may have spent some time underground. Both revealing and encasing, Jensen’s material inquiries have a morphological impulse. Linens scrunch and smooth over unorthodox frames. Something sharp is being covered. The arms of a wilting star appear stretched across a glowing page. A chopped and doubled clover pattern is blasted into a positive and negative image in plasma-cut steel. These concerns extend Jensen's object oriented affection to material, producing a circumstantial consciousness that upends ideas of use and value. Things are on their way to becoming something else, and we encounter them resplendent in a time between two states. 

One root of the word fall can be traced to the 12th century Old English noun fealle, meaning “to snare or trap." There are indeed some places to get caught, to have one’s attention arrested in this show. A silver mesh clover minnow trap becomes a mobile for Jensen’s neighborhood trinkets-turned-totems. This piece grounds the show, the trap becomes a treasure box: a place where things get stopped as much as they get spotlit. 

My Fall writhes against time in the perpetual present. Maren Jensen’s work serves as a reminder that falling is also, for a moment, floating: a suspension of it all, a weightless connection to the unknown.