The Strange Woman and Seven Diamond Miners is a 684-page erasure of a found book. I began this project in 2009 after finding two copies of The Strange Woman (by Ben Ames Williams) on separate occasions.  Williams' strange woman is revealed to the readers through the stories of seven men, and each man is given a section of the book.  In my revision each becomes a stand-in for one of the seven dwarfs from Snow White.  Mining the realm of pulp romance and fairy tale, the project is, in part, an attempt to present the text as image, a palimpsest and abstract rendering of line, paragraph and page, and as an epic narrative.  On another level, it's a means to reclaim, redefine and/or give voice to the book's object or main protagonist, a voice that has been lost within, or usurped by, a patriarchal system of values and beliefs embodied in the cult of consumerism.

I’m a compulsive collector of books (and printed ephemera) of all kinds, especially those with curious or comical titles bordering on the ridiculous.  I often make use of found text and rescued objects, finding beauty in the flaw and mistake, and humor in what I call "an aesthetic of the pathetic."  I use the process of erasure as another way of finding things, a treasure buried beneath the surface or hidden between the lines.  

Debra Jenks is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes photography, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and ephemeral public projects that meld fictive and autobiographical narratives. Her awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and residencies at Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Montalvo Arts Center and The Edward Albee Foundation.  Her work has been included in exhibitions at Stux Gallery, White Columns, The New Museum, The Bronx Museum, The International Print Center in New York, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art, Ruth Bachnor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Gallery Lombardi, Austin, TX, and A-Locatie Gallery, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.