Jenny Polak is an artist making architectural installation, drawing and web projects. She currently designs and builds hiding places for fugitive immigrants. Posing as modern furniture or 'para-architectural' structures, they invite people to use and copy them. Polak's work reconceives sites of immigrant-citizen struggle at home, at work, and in prison.

resume - short

 

"Historically, in wartime, artists are often put to work making camouflage.
In the present time of an undeclared state of war, Jenny Polak's designs parasitical artificial ceilings, double ceilings which function in ÒrealÓ life as ingenious hiding places. They keep their users, undocumented.. immigrants, purposely invisible, and safe when deportation-thirsty immigration officers arrive. A kind of camouflage for endangered species. I addition to this trouble making practice the artist is showing her ceiling prototypes in art exhibitions. In real world she helps immigrants to hide while through the artworld (and cultural attention) she makes the immigrants enforced invisibility--visible. A good double ceiling. A good double trouble. "

- Krzysztof Wodiczko 2004 commencement address, Maine College of Art