Jen Aitken: Courtyard
January 9-20, 2026
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002
Press Release
Opening Reception
January 9, 6-9 PM
Artist Talk with Giorgia Alliata + Ridwana Rahman
January 16, 6:30 PM
Public Programming
January 20, 6 PM
Jen Aitken joined Service at Nine last December following a ten-hour drive from Toronto, beginning her At Service Residency working directly from the basement space toward Courtyards. She constructed two sawhorse tables and unpacked the ceramic sculptures that form Dancers, using the gallery as a place to test, adjust, and respond. Through this hands-on process, she decided to build an environment for the collective works. A platform constructed at the center of the room unfolds through movement rather than offering a single, fixed viewpoint.
At the center of the gallery space, a courtyard-like structure brings attention to the space itself. Nothing is placed on the walls; instead, the surrounding architecture frames an interior landscape. This central arrangement draws focus away from the perimeter and into the room, creating a spatial condition that viewers look into and move around from multiple angles. As bodies shift position—walking, bending, pausing—perception changes, shaped by proximity, orientation, and the presence of others in the space.
Developed through extended time working in the gallery, the platform functions as a constructed terrain rather than a display table. Graduated steps introduce variation and create a series of settings that hold the sculptures in relation to one another. The structure reads as a landscape—intentionally staged and lightly theatrical—where scale, distance, and adjacency shape how each pairing comes into view.
Within this environment, Dancers are experienced in pairs. Their positioning emphasizes proximity, tension, and balance, moving between figurative and structural readings. The recurring pairing of two suggests an intimate, almost romantic dynamic, where meaning forms through relationship rather than individual objecthood. Scaled in relation to the human body, the works gently influence how viewers stand, turn, and orient themselves as they move through the space. Attention is drawn inward, toward the shared interior of the installation, where bodies gather and pass through at a measured pace.
Material and process remain visible throughout the work. The artist’s recent exploration of clay alongside welding marks reflects a loosening of an overworked geometric vocabulary, allowing form to emerge through making and leaning more fully into a figurative impulse. While concrete and other industrial materials have long suggested mass and weight in the artist’s practice and interest in urbanscapes, ceramic introduces a sense of transformation—soft to solid, imprint to edge, malleable to fixed—carrying a haptic quality that holds traces of touch, compression, and contact. Surfaces are treated as imprints rather than ornament, retaining evidence of change and decision. The sculptures feel honest in this way, careful and fragile without becoming precious, open in how they come to be.
The drawings, placed on the same platform, operate in parallel with the sculptures. Lines, marks, shadows, and scale move between mediums, informing one another without functioning as preparatory studies or translations. Welding spatters register as marks; shadows intersect with drawn lines. Across drawing and sculpture, figure, structure, and architecture remain in quiet conversation.
The works continue to unfold through repeated movement and sustained looking. As viewers spend time within the courtyard—circling, pausing, and returning—perception shifts with position and duration, allowing meaning to emerge through encounter rather than instruction, in the same room where the environment was developed over time.
—Text by Seoyoung Kim
About the artist:
Jen Aitken is based in Toronto, Canada. She makes sculptures that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She uses common industrial materials to create unidentifiable forms about intimacy, syntax, and bodily space. Aitken presented her first institutional solo show at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2023, titled The Same Thing Looks Different, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Her first large-scale public sculpture was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montreal, in 2023. She was commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, to create a site-specific installation for its 2020 Women to Watch exhibition. Aitken is represented by Trépanier Baer gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and her work is in public collections across Canada, including Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
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