Last remaining copies of this super limited-edition calendar by most brilliant LA-based musician and artist Jenna Thornhill, published by Jess Scott's imprint Quinto Quarto Quarterly (QQQ)!
Jenna Thornhill is a San Pedro, Calif.-based artist and musician. Cradled in her long history of ground-breaking music groups (here, here, here and here), Thornhill has exhibited jewelry-making, visual work, and now, a prolific adventure through sculpture via the medium of challah bread. Thornhill maintains that creating sculptures during the weekly ritual of bread-making traditional to her Jewish ancestry actually came from a need for sanity-tasks during a divorce. It became gradually clear that these delicate, edible creations were more than a Friday night activity-- they were works of art in-total.
In 2019 Thornhill began laboriously experimenting and testing materials for casting these works-of-flour in preservation. Additionally, she explored kitchen-pantry items for natural, edible coloring (i.e. beet root, coffee, et cetera).
The subject matter contained within these 12 highlighted works (plus dozens of thumbnails of challah-chainsaws, challah-snakes, and beyond) are distinct objects of Thornhill’s visual armory as well as the semi-urban port town of San Pedro, California (~24 miles from downtown Los Angeles): from the natural landscape of coyotes, octopuses, pelicans, seagulls, kelp bass, to man-made signage recommending escape routes from riptide currents in the ocean. Her work spans the southland in nuanced ways: impressions of personal objects from her native San Fernando Valley (her mother’s mobile-sketch kit featuring a surreal self-portrait) to renditions of wild, improbable burros running free across highways in the Inland Empire (true story).
Thornhill’s work in the Jewish-medium of challah is then presented in a dual Jewish/Gregorian calendar, fittingly. In the calendar’s introduction, Thornhill remarks that the former type of calendar could most easily be obtained at several Los Angeles-area Jewish cemeteries. Thornhill’s personalized version features among Jewish holidays, radical anniversaries of liberatory events, radical holidays, jazz saxophonist signficance, and other sub-cultural signposts. Thornhill’s “special challot” are works of delicate permanence, evolving, existing, and perhaps decaying on another timeline unknown to any ancient or modern year-keeping method.
Softcover spiral-bound, full-color, Jewish Year 5781 (Gregorian September 2020-21). Each calendar is sealed, numbered and signed by the artist, with a hand-stamped QQQ imprint.
