(Seattle, WA) – I'm Trying to Tell You Something is a visceral documentation of Intimate Partner Femicide by interdisciplinary artist Jennifer Leigh Harrison that explicates issues of erasure and denial through painting, performance, and installation. Recognized by the UN as a “shadow pandemic,” the issue is even more pressing with the current political rise of hegemonic masculinity, social control, and the dismantling of critical research, social and welfare services created to protect women.  Harrison references "patriarchal terrorism" as not being a simplification of men killing women, but a consideration of the many undocumented murders that reveal a broader issue of power and location.

The exhibition features a series of large canvases, including 1,689, which enumerates in violent and chaotic order the number of documented American women killed by an intimate partner in 2021. The death marks were made with house rags, representing domestic place and how women are treated as beneath a system still in need of legal codification and national surveillance.

The accompanying installation Put a Pin In It includes 4,790 pinned dried gomphrena flowers (derived from Greek amaranth, one that does not whither), that collectively reflect the number of US femicides in 2021 and draw attention to the tragedy women face in the stalling and silencing that occurs when they try to speak up. Text panels throughout the gallery also provide links to online facts about IPV (statistics highlighting BIPOC, LGBTQ, childhood risk, etc.).

Her live performance Autopsia (derived from Greek, seeing with one's own eyes) invites the public to participate in making visible these harms by mapping them to the body as a call for systemic change through visibility, education and public responsibility, as well as her video installation with guests from Seattle Pole Dance. In addition, a panel discussion on June 7th with local experts on Intimate Partner Violence will address the community and specifically BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals who are disproportionally impacted.  Panelists include representatives from respected domestic violence organizations Our Sisters' House, Ampkwa Advocacy, Lifewire and ReWA.

Jennifer Leigh Harrison is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, social worker and psychotherapist who works with performance art, installation, critical essay, poetry and painting.  She is known for using her intuitive body and raw emotion to create large scale gestural abstract paintings.