"25 Imaginary Works" started as a challenge to myself to imagine a series of impossible artworks that I never under any circumstances could actually complete. And then, oddly, they became a series of actual works -- a series of 25 picture frames with calligraphy in silver on black paper. Then I started the video series of 25 Imaginary Works. . . So a series of impossible to make works actually spawned fifty actual works. Ironic, huh?
25 artworks that Jen Frankel plans to never ever actually create.
The 25 Imaginary Works series started off as a kind of a joke: to create a description of something that could never be achieved in actual media of any sort, but that would stimulate the imagination. Now they exist as twenty-five framed calligraphic treatments, digital versions of the same, and as post- and greeting cards. Eight have been made into short animated films. So twenty-five bits of impossibility have developed what you might call a life of their own, entirely outside the realm of the abstract and yet still without the potential (or at least the likelihood) to be rendered the way they themselves say they should be.