Jennifer Pritchard: The Offing
The Offing examines the fluidity of time and the places where we find solace.
February 2021 presented a perfect block of time, four seven-day weeks stacked atop each other.
In the dystopia of 2020, predictable patterns of temporal life were conflated into the trinity of yesterday, today, and tomorrow and further still to past and present, made more profound by our mother's rapidly declining health. The New Year promised renewed hope and a return to the freedoms lost during a year of quarantine. The ritual of taking a morning photograph seaside was intended as a reset in a perfect February. But there is no such thing as a perfect block of time.
If there was no order to time, if time was an abstraction, it followed that other things I held as absolute were as well.
The horizon's equanimity has been a part of my life for over twenty years, assuringly stringing my days together. Standing seaside each morning, I held the paradox of time and timelessness as I navigated my mother's finite days in the Offing and the vast and infinite ocean. The daily ritual informed new thinking about the elasticity of time, memory, loss, and the things we hold constant- our small, fragile place within the natural world.
Bio
Pritchard is a photographic artist and storyteller based in Laguna Beach, California. Her experience includes years as an innovative, creative fashion executive leading global brands - telling rich and compelling stories to engage and excite consumers. A skilled business leader in delivering results in complex situations and markets, her passion and highly collaborative nature galvanized teams to accomplish their goals.
In 2015, her father's death inspired her to tell her own stories.
Geographies have played an essential part in her perspective, whether the New England of her birth, her Mid-Atlantic upbringing, Southern schooling, or internationally through her roles in Global Brand Leadership. In Pritchard, understanding places and their rich stories engendered a deep appreciation of the unique and the common. A natural curiosity combined with a paradox-filled childhood inspired explorations of life and loss, memory, and dreams across a diverse photographic and literary toolbox.
Pritchard was chosen as an Emerging Artist in 2017 by APA National, and in 2022 she was honored for Reverberations in the Critical Mass Top 200. Her work is an ongoing part of the collections at On Center Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her collection The Offing is included in the traveling exhibition Memory is a Verb, a group of 11 women photographers exploring Time and Transience, opening in January 2023 at the Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, California.