Amanda von Canada (JAHN, *1986) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, installation, sculpture, and text. Her practice investigates the intersection of personal experience and collective narratives, examining how social values, cultural myths, and emotional belief systems shape individual identity.
Drawing from the visual languages of advertising, popular media, literature, and everyday communication, Jahn creates works that move between humour and unease. Saturated colour, fragmented imagery, text, and the layering of photographic and painterly processes are recurring elements within her practice. Through these strategies, she explores the tension between what is publicly performed and what remains psychologically embedded.
Her projects often begin with stories that exist beyond the individual. In Animal Farm, Jahn examines power, conformity, and the cyclical nature of political structures through the lens of allegory. The Life of Pi explores themes of survival, uncertainty, and resilience, while Gadji Beri Bimba considers the persistence of historical violence and the ways collective memory continues to shape the present. Her Contextual Sculpture works expand these investigations into space, treating objects and installations as active participants in the construction of meaning rather than as static forms.
Recent projects have increasingly focused on the mechanisms through which ideology is transmitted and internalized. Through the use of text, repetition, and architectural interventions, Jahn examines how emotional language, inherited narratives, and systems of belonging become embedded within everyday life. Her installations often function as environments to be navigated, positioning viewers within the structures they are asked to consider.
By combining visual immediacy with conceptual inquiry, Jahn's work invites reflection on the stories people inherit, repeat, and perform, revealing how personal experience is inseparable from the broader social and political frameworks that shape it.
My works are complicated stories that can be packed away and taken off the wall.
Bright and heavy, they exist in an unconscious place. I struggle with them, mostly because they force me to look at things I would rather look away from.
What materializes comes from somewhere hidden, but I actively choose the colours.
Sunshine yellow, sky blue, fern green, red; colour has an awesome language and I have always been drawn to it because of its representational ability. My colour choice is a way of ‘slapping a new coat of paint’ on decrepit structures and constitutions - dressing it up to make it easier to look at.