Welcome to the home of Wendy Well and Joan Dare. In an effort to create space between
​myself (Jenna North) and my alter egos I plan to house content related to them here. 

Through Joan Dare, Jenna believes that she can whitewash the erratic Wendy Well by acting as her cohort, while secretly developing a more Washington D.C. appropriate alter-ego, and Joan Dare is born. The fall of 2016 shed a dark grey cloud over Washington. The type of cloud that let’s little light through; one that reminds us of the impermanence of life as we know it. Pain paired with a wedding, a bigoted and greedy orange monster replaced a the inspiring intellectual first African American President of the United States. So much progress lost. Joan’s role seems to remind me us to laugh and lighten up. Through her, Jenna is able to tap-dance her way into a state of blissful ignorance in the name of white privilege.
 
Joan, a Senators wife, enthusiastically arrives in Washington from her homestead in rural Kansas. Joan spends her days on self-expression through her passion for Broadway musicals, tap dancing, and her love of the arts. She’s building a network of socialites to attend her tea parties intended to elevate the importance of small talk, with an emphasis on the weather. Although she is interested in cultural activities and artistic expression, she prefers to ignore the darker side of humanity, and avoids the news. Seemingly unaware of her immunity to challenges faced by groups of people that can’t benefit from being born with white skin, we discover that Joan was actually raised by poor farmers that were basically serfs to large agribusiness. Another recent discovery is that fracking was invented in Kansas, and Joan is related to the engineer that designed the first ever frack site.

Wendy Well arrived in upstate NY in 2012, when I was teaching at Pratt and struggling to conduct a large environmental community art project in the Maldives amidst political unrest that is ever present today. This hydrofracking obsessed woman acted as a supernatural possession that succeeded in directing me to engulf in research through destructive means of familiarizing myself with the industry. As Wendy, I learned the basics of “how to frack”. I read industry textbooks written by geophysicists, visited former fracked sites and collected and appropriated items to simulate gas-drilling remains. I filmed distraught farmers personal accounts of allowing the industry to frack their land without being informed of the health risks and toxic outcome of cracked pipes, methane exhaust, and contaminated wells that would affect the well being of their family and neighbors. I spent a day in Dimmock, PA and had an enlightening visit with a former fracking worker. I attended protests, town hall meetings, and toggled between my own deep concern and disgust, and Wendy’s adoration and obsessional behaviors.
 
Wendy pranced all over New York State and Pennsylvania, trespassing whenever she was so inclined. The shale cliffs that make up the heavenly gorges in Ithaca, New York were a major muse for me to congregate a deeper investigation into this flawed industry. And the rust belt that follows the Eerie Canal has much to offer an aspiring fractress! Salvage yards and abandoned construction sites have all the makings for creating a fracked set. Naturally these projects embarked by this estranged being had to arrive at a practical application, so Wendy decided to become a post-apocolyptic interior decorator. Everything I fear about the future of our planet comes true through Wendy. Her approach to embracing/decorating a post-apocalyptic world both heightens and subdues my anxiety and hyperawareness of the impending doom humans are facing due to our role in the changing climate.
 
In an effort to refocus my efforts back to my functional eco art projects I’ve made multiple attempts of killing Wendy off, but she continues to resurface. Before I moved to D.C. in 2016, inspired by the Paris Climate Conference, Wendy staged a workshop on the national mall called “Flower Arranging For the Apocalypse”. Her tried Martha Stewart-esque show included creative ways of decorating with gun shells, flower power towers, and drowning islands in crystal turquoise water filled vases topped with metal drill forms, warning flags turned into lilies, and painted plastic flowers. Her desire to make things pretty plays into my longtime interest into the history of ornamentation and its role in fine art painting. The darkness that spread across the US after the Presidential election results were announced was both disabling and desperate. Wendy whispered me out of my art-making hiatus, and together we created a home on Earths sister planet. Drowned island spirits accompanied us, and Wendy and I took turns playing in the space themed space in my Bethesda, MD studio housed in a soon-to-be demolished mall a as I devised a new plan to murder her. A sword fight in space seemed the most suitable, so I badgered my husband for fencing lessons.
 
 
 
 
 
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