Draft:Jenny Okun

Jennifer Denise Okun Sparks (b. 1953) is an artist, photographer,­­­­ and filmmaker known for her large architectural abstract images, stage projections and experimental films.

Her photographs and triptychs have been exhibited widely in the United States and England and are included in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. She has studios in London and Los Angeles.

Early Life and Education
Okun’s childhood was spent in Greenwich Village where her family was involved in the 1950s New York folk scene. Her father, Milton Okun, was a record producer and arranger and her mother, Rosemary Okun, was a writer and painter.

In 1971, Okun moved to England to study painting, photography, and film. She read art and experimental media at Wimbledon College of Art, Chelsea School of Art, and Slade School of Fine Art. She has held various teaching posts: running the film production workshop at The London Film-Makers Co-op, photography/painting at Chelsea School of Art and painting and colour studies at Central School of Art and Design. Between 1975 and 1980, she made about a dozen short experimental films about the British landscape which explored musical notation and sound. In 1985 she began focusing solely on her work as a photographer and artist.

Career
Okun's artworks consist of large-scale colour photographic abstractions of architectural works. These are often likened to the work of early 20th Century Cubist painters such as Georges Braque, as they present several views of the same subject from different angles. Her early practice involved the use of Hasselblad, Yashika, and Konica cameras to wind film in small increments through the camera to capture images overlapped and superimposed. Okun stumbled upon this process accidentally while creating an experimental short film capturing waves breaking on the beach in 1973. Initially, hand-cranking the film to simulate the fluidity of the waves, she inadvertently dislodged it from its sprockets. Intrigued by the unexpected imagery, Okun delved into further exploration. She began intentional experimentation with rolls of 2 1/4-inch colour film, purposefully overlapping exposures and refining the effects digitally. A single image may comprise six such overlays, which are orchestrated into triptychs of complex interconnecting themes and variations.

Aiming to capture the essence of architectural structures rather than to represent them literally, Okun’s work has been described by architect Frank Gehry as going “straight to the soul of architecture”. She bases her work on wide range of architectural periods and styles, with artworks featuring Richard Rogers’ Millennium Dome (Greenwich, London), Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao, Spain), the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City (Italy), the  Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas, ​​Exeter Cathedral (Exeter, England) and the New York Plaza Hotel. In 1997, she was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to photograph its new building, designed by architect Richard Meier. One of these images was selected for a poster commemorating the opening of the building in 1998.

In 2013 Okun created photographic projections for the stage design of the LA Opera World Premiere production of Lee Holdridge’s  Dulce Rosa conducted by Plácido Domingo. Richard Sparks, Jenny’s husband, was the director and librettist of the production. Jenny, Lee and Richard collaborated with Isabel Allende to bring one of her short stories, Una Veganza to the opera stage. The stage design was based on photographic projections created by Okun, combining digitally collaged vistas of palatial haciendas, stained glass churches and vine-covered jungle.

Her last Museum exhibition was in Lecce, Italy where she was invited by the city to photograph its architecture for the inaugural show at the new Museo Storico della Citta di Lecce (MUST).