JEANNE JAFFE
"Betwixt and Between"October 17 , 2026 - January 20, 2027
Exhibition text by Jennifer Inacio
Between Experiencing and Knowing
By Jennifer Inacio, Associate Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami.
In Betwixt and Between, Jeanne Jaffe presents sculptures, animations, and prints about experiences we register before we can put them into words. Her figures are strange and bodily, built from a vocabulary that’s recognizable but will not hold still. A hollow opening might be an eye or a mouth. A tube could be a limb, a handle, an organ, a pipe. A coil at the base might be a pedestal, or a body that has not finished unwinding. The works evoke the human body without settling into one, and what looks familiar at first gets harder to name the longer you look.
Jaffe, who worked for many years in Pennsylvania before moving to South Florida, trained in ceramics at Alfred University. She has long worked across clay, bronze, paper, installation, and video, and animation is not new to her: earlier projects such as Tesla’s Dream (2015) and Alice in Dystopia (2020) already set her imagery in motion. What is new here is how closely sculpture and animation are paired along with the prints.
The exhibition grows out of Jaffe’s interest in the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas and his idea of the “unthought known”—knowledge that shapes how we experience the world without ever having been put into language. Bollas traces it to our earliest encounters, impressions laid down before we had words to organize them. For Jaffe, the concept is a way into sensations and memories we carry with us even when we can’t say where they came from. Her work also stretches the moment between recognizing something and naming it, long enough for us to notice that moment, and ourselves inside it.
One can see this in how the sculptures are made. Jaffe works intuitively in clay; in her project statement she writes that her “hands do the thinking.” Clay pushes back. It bends under pressure, holds the mark of a thumb, sags, cracks, joins, gets reworked. It does not just take on a picture the artist already has in mind, and the forms that result look found rather than meticulously planned. An opening starts to read as an eye and then turns into a cavity; something that looks like an arm loop back into the body of the piece.
The openings that recur through the show make this especially clear. In Oculus (2025), two long, rimmed slots are cut into a pale, headlike form. They read instantly as eyes, but there are no pupils to meet, just darkness inside. Peek into the slit eyes of Phantom (year) and the clay itself shows up, rougher and darker than the speckled glaze around it. The openings prove there is an interior and show you nothing in it. This is close to how the unthought known works: we can sense that something is there, but it was never shaped into a picture or a story we could bring back.
Nervous Systems (2025) carries the idea from the head into the whole body. A pink bulb with a single small opening sit on a column of stacked segments, and pairs of short branches come off the column like ribs. More tubes fan out around the bulb, with pale strands threaded through their open ends. It reads as anatomy, but nobody is built this way. It looks more like a diagram of how a feeling might travel: in through the opening, down the column, out through the ends.
These forms can also be seen on paper. In the etchings and linocuts of the Double Figures series (2026), on which some of the sculptures and animations are based, each figure is mirrored down the middle like an inkblot, so that every body is also two. Figure #1 (2026) can read as a rabbit, a moth, or a pelvis, depending on where the eye lands. Jaffe prints the same plate or block again and again, in blue, red, and black, and in “ghost” impressions, fainter second pulls made without fresh ink. One form passes through many states, and the ghosts in particular hold an image at the moment it begins to fade.
The animations carry all this into time. Jaffe calls them “object biographies,”[3] which implies the sculptures have lives longer than the moment we spend with them. In the middle gallery, individual animations play on the walls alongside the sculptures. In the back room, they come together as a single projection: a grid of twelve looping films playing side by side. A head melts into drips, a body splits open like a shell, a figure dissolves into smoke or scatters into bright yellow blocks, and the loop brings it back. Meeting the sculptures again there, after leaving them in the previous room, feels a little like remembering them. The animations are not explanations; they will not tell you what the objects really are.
Jaffe describes this as turning the artwork “from a noun into a verb.” We usually think of a sculpture as a thing: discrete, material, finished. Through animation and repetition, Jaffe’s objects acquire duration. They act; they live.
The same interest leads her to the Pygmalion myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s sculptor carves his statue from ivory, and when Venus answers his prayer, the ivory softens like wax beneath his thumb until it becomes a woman. It is a story about touch, fitting for an artist whose hands do the thinking. But Ovid completes the transformation in a few lines. Jaffe, in her own words, holds it “permanently open.” Her objects never become human, and they don’t need to.
The exhibition’s title names this in-between condition, and it carries a history. “Betwixt and between” is closely associated with the anthropologist Victor Turner, who used it in a well-known 1964 essay for the middle stage of a rite of passage, when initiates have left one status and not yet entered the next. Such in-between figures, he wrote, are “neither one thing nor another; or may be both.” Studying initiation rites among the Ndembu of Zambia and their neighbors, Turner observed that the masks and figures shown to initiates often enlarge a single feature, such as a head, a nose, or a phallus, or join parts that do not belong together, like a man’s head on a lion’s body. Their purpose, he argued, was not to frighten. Instead, “the outstandingly exaggerated feature is made into an object of reflection,” and monsters startle initiates into thinking about what they had “hitherto taken for granted.” Jaffe’s figures are not ritual objects, but they work in a similar way.
Turner’s point is easiest to feel in front of the large Pink Muse (2025). Raised on its plinth, the pink head towers over a visitor, its eyes set at about our own eye level or a little above. Its features are pared down almost to nothing: a textured pink face, a smooth cream sweep of hair ending in ridged coils over the ears, and two short tubes where the eyes should be. Enlarged far past the size of a real head, it becomes a face we are made to think about as a face. From across the room it looks funny, a little like a cartoon. Up close, the scale changes the relationship. We’re looking at it, and it’s hard to shake the sense that it’s looking back.
We usually scan a face for mood, intention, recognition. Jaffe gives us the basic architecture of a face and leaves those cues out. The tube eyes have no pupils and no lids; they are two dark holes held out toward you through which you can look out the world. With nothing to read, attention turns back on itself, and you become aware of your own looking. Here the pause between seeing a face and reading it stretches long enough for the roles to switch. This reversal is close to what Jaffe means when she writes of wanting to see the inanimate object “restored to the status of subject.”
Turner also noted that initiates were sometimes represented “as being neither male nor female,” since in the in-between state such distinctions “do not apply.” Large Sentinel (2026) stands upright inside the coil of its own base, its arms looped down so that its hands meet at its groin, over a small spiral that reads at first as male genitalia. Then one notices the hair, wound into coiled buns we tend to read as feminine, and the figure’s sex becomes harder to call. A sentinel is a guard, someone posted to keep watch, and this one seems to be guarding the question itself.
Turner described the in-between as “a realm of pure possibility,” and the idea feels timely. So much of public life right now is framed as one side against another, and we are pushed to decide fast. Naming is basic to how we make sense of things, but a name given too quickly can flatten whatever does not fit it. Jaffe is not asking us to give up language or categories, only questioning how fast we reach for them. Her forms ask to be met first through sensation, and the space “betwixt and between” becomes a kind of attention.
Betwixt and Between gives the in-between a physical shape. The sculptures keep the intelligence of the hand, the prints double and fade, and the animations give the objects a life in time. Jaffe does not ask us to resolve any of it. She leaves room for things to be sensed before they are named and suggests that staying a while in between might be its own way of knowing.
About Jeanne Jaffe
Jeanne Jaffe is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses installation, sculpture, printmaking, and stop-motion animation. Her work is informed by an ongoing interest in language, literature, psychology, and history, exploring how identity, perception, and systems of value are constructed.
Jaffe has received fellowships and grants from the South Florida Cultural Consortium, National Endowment for the Arts, Gottlieb Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Foundation, and Virginia A. Groot Foundation, among others. She has presented more than twenty solo exhibitions, most recently at L’Space Gallery in New York and Spinello Projects in Miami.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Mino Washi Museum in Mino, Japan; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; Woodmere Art Museum; James A. Michener Art Museum; Fuller Craft Museum; and Hunterdon Art Museum. Her work is held in collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, the Sculpture Garden at Abington Art Center, and the Zimmerli Art Museum.
Jaffe has participated in artist residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, Deering Estate in Miami, the Mino Artist Residency in Japan, Yaddo in New York, Women’s Studio Workshop, the Rutgers Innovative Printmaking Workshop, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, among others. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and Sculpture Magazine. Jaffe lives and works in South Florida.