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Jen Catron (b. 1984 in Farrington Township, Illinois)& Paul Outlaw (b. 1980 in Fairhope, Alabama) are collaborative interdisciplinary conceptual artists based in Brooklyn NY USA. Using performance, paintings, video, and mechanics, they create layered pieces that approach the subject matter from all the senses, creating unique participatory experiences that oscillate between the tragic and absurd. Their work has involved placing a dinner table and its diners on a hydraulic lift, live chickens, pig fountains, a crawfish food truck, a tour Chelsea tour bus that sold editioned knock offs of famous artworks, and a gallery-sized art-world themed Monopoly game board activated by actual players. It poke[s] fun at contemporary American culture and question[s] the belief systems that inform it” . They are currently represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York City.

Biography

Jennifer Erin Catron was born in 1984 in rural Farrington Township, Illinois. She received her Bachelor's in Fine Arts from Southeast Missouri State University. Paul Wesley Outlaw was born in 1980 in Fairhope, Alabama. The youngest of six kids, Paul's family catches crawfish with their bare hands . He started his college career at a small Mississippi school in advertising, but earned his Bachelor's in Fine Arts from the University of Alabama in 2003. Both Jennifer and Paul grew up in very religious households.

Jen and Paul met while attending graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art. After receiving their Masters of Fine Art in 2009, they moved to Brooklyn, New York where Paul opened the fabrication shop The Factory NYC . They are partners in life and creative practice, having worked their way up through New York's scene . They also have their art studio in Brooklyn, where they continue to work today.

Career

Jen and Paul create and manipulate multi-media environments engulfing the viewers in the spectacle along the way. Drawing on American culture of extreme excess, their projects involve mechanical automations, video, painting, photography, and performance to create immersive participatory experiences. With Jen n’ Outlaw’s Fish Fry Truck and Crawfish Boil, 2010-11, the work explored a growing geographical divide between our cultural homes and their new home, NYC. It gained recognition within the city's growing food truck buzz, receiving press by the New York Times, Gothamist, among others. Embodying their hometown roots, they simultaneously delivered the expectations of comfort food in a literal representation of its relation to Americana and food service. They made an appearance on The Food Network's series Chopped during Season 23, episode 6, as well as the network's since cancelled series Eat Street (Season 2, Episode 4) in 2011. Creating immersive interactive objects such as Jen and Paul’s One Stop Shopping Souvenir City and Chelsea bus tours was Chelsea’s first double decker tour bus and souvenir shop, a piece that operated in the fall of 2016. It pointed out many inequalities and absurdities found in the Chelsea art scene, from lack of representation for women and minorities, to the collector and gallerist relations, all atop a tongue in cheek, gaudy home made tour bus through loud speakers. The bottom floor sold souvenirs of art-world tchotchkes, undermining the market and giving every day people a “piece of the artworld” for $15, $20. Souvenirs included a do-it-yourself performance-art kit inspired by Ms. Abramović and James Franco, as well as a fake Damien Hirst piece featuring a goldfish in a shark costume submerged in formaldehyde. Other souvenirs included a baby bib with a Christopher Wool text emblazoned on it or Vito Acconici lube. Some of the slapstick replications were being sold concurrent to the originals on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art. On the deck of the bus were seats, and where Jen and Paul guided passengers to a driving tour of Chelsea. Guest tour guides included Paddy Johnson, Sean Patrick Carney and William Powida. . Jerry Saltz listed this piece as among the 19 Best Art Shows of 2014.

In December 2011, Jen & Paul had their first New York solo show Imeday, Imeday, Ollarday, Icklenay at Allegra LaViola Gallery. A theatrically elaborate weekly dinner party, guests were seated at a long decadent dinner table and hydraulically lifted into the ceiling, rising higher between courses. Performers in the experience included a man in a goat costume and a cast of half-naked Jabberwockian characters. As guests' legs dangled down, gallery-goers looked up at them from below, while the various elaborately costumed performers stood on ladders and poked their heads through holes in the table Having been referred to as "feasts for the apocalypse" in a "banquet hall of epic proportions" It was later declared the "best New York art event this decade" by Paddy Johnson for Observer in 2019. In 2012, also at Allegra LaViola Gallery, they had their second solo show Super Supra Diluvian, where the artists strapped themselves to a giant wheel, and were spun around and dipped into a vat of gold to symbolize monetary luxury and excess. They made a performative appearance at The Brooklyn Artists Ball at The Brooklyn Museum in 2015, alongside equally charged modern thinkers whose work spoke to the undeniable emergence of the Brooklyn influence on the contemporary art scene . This same year, both Jen and Paul were awarded monthlong residencies at French Riviera by the La Napoule Art Foundation, during which Paul proposed to Jen while on a sunset hike .

They mechanized boat rides through Postmasters Gallery in their first solo show in New York City Behold! I teach you the Overman! in April 2016, where they constructed humorous and challenging experiences that were both fun and intellectually confrontational. A stairlift carried a single viewer into a four-way projection video box that played a grotesque imagining of the Last Supper with celebrities and personalities recognized from their various positions in culture, from Silvio Berlusconi scooping spaghetti from Kim Kardashian's buttocks, to Vincent Van Gogh slicing off his ear beside Marshall Applewhite marionetting a real dead chicken. "The circularity of cultural gluttony, false prophets and their relation to what the society is convinced of as reality is explored via the elaborate set pieces, videos, performance and multimedia paintings. The works aim to physically and metaphorically transport the viewer to higher levels of existence."

Their most recent work has focused on belief systems, examining how we arrived at this cultural tense moment, where beliefs and facts are interchanged easily in a post-truth era. In their second Postmasters Gallery show an idea of god, or a toothbrush, that opened in January 2019. The title is based off a quote by Dada artist Tristan Tzara, which set the tone for "perfectly sensible nonsensical logic...both endearing and insane". Miniatures represented various conspiracies and tragedies, such as the Banana Massacre, and Alex Jones' imagined bathroom. Three oversized sculptures rounded out the show: a man's overweight torso pegged with arrows (Tipping Point), a hugh sink pouring dirtied-looking water from its faucet

cows

(Sin(k)), and a towering spinning ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce drizzling from it's cherried top (B.O.S (Bright Shiny Object)). The latter two sculptures were later featured in the atrium of the Brooklyn Museum. "The monumental scale of these works suggests a celebration of a way of life that consumer culture has come to expect, one that includes access to abundant running water and the possibility of indulging in sweet treats. At the same time, the sculptures possess a subtly subversive edge, with hints of a more dystopic version of the American Dream lying beneath the veneer of appearances." Tipping Point was included in the Postmasters' Spring Break Art Fair booth in 2019.

Other exhibitions include a video piece Coming Soon that appeared at NADA Art Fair. Pocket Size was a group show focused on miniatures exhibited at Mike Kelley's mobile homestead at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in September 2018. Preliminary pieces from idea of god, or a toothbrush were included in this group show. They have participated in many more group exhibitions and projects in varying capacity including Moving Image Art Fair in London, and Rush Gallery, BRIC Arts , Wassaic Projects in New York, among others.