Jeanette Andrews
she/her
Jeanette Andrews | Sponsored Artist 2016 | Photo courtesy of Isabelle Grybow
Utilizing her decades-long technical training in sleight-of-hand magic, Jeanette Andrews creates interactive, surreal vignettes that explore the nature of perception and cognition. Andrews’ work focuses on the development of the seemingly impossible via performance, installation and audio to bring her ideas about hidden worlds to life.
She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances which function as live thought experiments. Often utilizing refined, yet common items such as glassware, paper, plants, and fabric, her works investigate perceptual anomalies, expectation violation, and the nature of belief.
Photo courtesy of Derrick Belcham
The Project
Photo courtesy of Derrick Belcham
During her residency, Jeanette Andrews engineered the sensory machine, rehearsed in the HCL studio, and prepared the larger performance work Sensory Illusion Studio for performances in museums, galleries, and schools:
“You enter a nearly empty room and discover a white gramophone with a large horn. Surrounding it are several boxes filled with simply-labeled discs—but these are no ordinary music discs. Each reveals an olfactory landscape that will - transport you through the past, present, and future.
You have entered the world of Scent Echoed by sensory illusionist Jeanette Andrews, an immersive performance work that subverts the traditional ‘magic’ narrative and explores what is perhaps the most emotional and overlooked of the senses.”
About the Artist
Jeanette Andrews has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as well as for the Quebec City Biennial and Boca Raton Museum of Art and is internationally recognized as a pioneer in her field. Andrews is also an acclaimed speaker, presenting with MIT, the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas, The British Society of Aesthetics, corporations, and universities (including Columbia and Harvard Law School’s Petrie Flom Center and Harvard’s Graduate Center for Design,) and conferences across the country. Andrews is a 2023/2024 National Arts Club Fellow and also a prior Affiliate of metaLab (at) Harvard. Andrews’ performances have been praised by the Chicago Tribune, PBS, and the New York Times. And Artnet says, “Andrews’s avant-garde approach to magic transforms it into performance art.”
For more information, visit JeanetteAndrewsStudio.com
