JEF
by Jeremy Couillard
Presented by TSS x Daata
February - March 2020
JEF is a cosmology inspired by world building techniques in sci-fi literature, luxury space communism fantasies and human/computer interaction. The project takes on many forms from animation and simulation to video games and stand-alone video objects. JEF started with an animation short, HOTR Home Furnishing, about a colonial alien on Earth who visits an Ikea-like warehouse that has been converted into a labor camp where Earth’s former elite are forced to put together furniture for regular people.
Subsequent iterations have included a 40 minute animated look into the lives of the aliens and humans for Infinite Objects, an Instagram project with the Bass Museum showing a self-portrait of one alien as he goes about his mundane life on Earth and a simulation of one of the planets that gives us a glimpse into the inner thoughts of some of a city’s inhabitants.
The project culminates in an expansive video game, released on the Steam gaming platform, where we control the body of the alien, who wakes up with its memory erased and quickly learns its home planet has been taken over by a spa cult. The player must help the alien escape and go on intergalactic adventures to learn its identity and what its JEF stands for.
Jeremy Couillard was born in 1980 in Michigan. Couillard has exhibited at Zabludowicz Collection (London, U.K.), Phillips Auction House (co-commissioned by daata editions) (New York, NY), Denny-Dimin Gallery, (New York, NY), yours, mine & ours gallery (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Louis B. James (New York, NY), Youngworld (Detroit, MI), Zhulong Gallery (Dallas, TX), and has screened his work at the New Museum and Rhizome (New York, NY), Salon 94 (New York, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY). Couillard’s work has been featured or reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Frieze Magazine, Art in America, VICE’s The Creators Project, The Washington Post, FAD, artnet news, ARTNews, the Huffington Post, and the Observer.Couillard’s work is in important collections including the Zabludowicz Collection. He is currently represented by Denny-Dimin gallery in New York.