Glenna Jennings

glennajennings.com | @glenna_goes_places

In Our Own: backyard (sur)realisms from a global pandemic

In her ongoing series, Glenna Jennings explores backyards as an interstitial space bridging domesticity and wilderness. Photographs of backyards in San Diego, CA, Ensenada, MX and Dayton, OH.

Glenna Jennings Artist Statement:

In Our Own: backyard (sur)realisms from a global pandemic

Seven months ago, I found myself in my own backyard. This was not long after the drear of the Ohio winter had departed and the global pandemic had arrived. This backyard experience happened not long before George Floyd was murdered on a street not far from my Midwest doorstep, mere weeks before the nation would collectively mourn this death and demand racial justice as other nations joined in. The day I set foot on our scratchy grass was mere months before fires would engulf the west coast, sending their ashes across imaginary borders and destroying very real walls.

On this ordinary day made extraordinary by shared circumstances, I saw this yard for the first time. I recognized its values, both economic and spiritual, natural and constructed. In a nation that prides itself on private ownership, backyards can often be spaces of privileged escape and status. Yet in my middle-class Midwest neighborhood and beyond, yards also offer shared states of connection where pets mingle with the native flora and kids revel with fauna both wild and domestic. Yards provide sustenance in the form of vegetable gardens, venues for garage bands, fields for athletics, seats for meditation and scenes for Sunday painters. In the more extraordinary worlds of horror and fantasy, the backyard is often a portal to another universe, a place where nature and wilderness compete for primacy – a little biome in which the groomed and orderly meet with the macabre and supernatural. 

In a time of collective grief, trauma and fear, I began to seek out my own backyard for its more unearthly promises. Or, perhaps, for its very existence as earth underneath a human-wrought system of myths and social expectations. A friend of mine recently stated that the pandemic prompted the earth to “tell us to all go back to our rooms and think about what we have done.” With my ‘own’ grass crunching under my feet on that first day of creative self-reckoning, I was confronting a sense of shame and anger that is tied – chaotically – to my own existence in the Anthropocene, this contested age of disproportionate human influence on Earth systems. In this age, human arrogance mingles with environmental indifference and politically-charged fears collide with a collectively-desperate curiosity about our bodies, our biomes and our fates.

In Our Own meshes traditional landscape with constructed portraiture to evoke this need for escape in troubled times. As this series unfolds, it takes on tones both reverent and ironic while grappling with life writ-large in the shared Anthropocene and moments etched-small in our own private patches of earth.