{"id":1972,"date":"2025-08-26T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/?p=1972"},"modified":"2025-10-06T10:50:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T10:50:23","slug":"jenis-ice-cream-x-cj-hendry-explore-the-art-of-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/26\/jenis-ice-cream-x-cj-hendry-explore-the-art-of-absence\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeni\u2019s Ice Cream X Cj Hendry Explore the Art of Absence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been following Cj Hendry\u2019s work since 2013<\/a>, when she was drawing in black and white pen with painstaking precision. Back then, her focus was on surface and detail. Over the years, I\u2019ve watched Hendry push her practice outward, moving from colored pencils into immersive experiences that swallow you whole<\/a>, each new project less about the object itself and more about how we engage with it. Her latest project, in collaboration with Jeni\u2019s Splendid Ice Creams<\/a>, continues that evolution. An edible artwork called OPAQUE<\/a>, both a limited-edition ice cream and a pop-up installation in New York City, challenges one of the most ingrained assumptions about ice cream: that it should be colorful.<\/p>\n

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Ice cream has always been a visual medium as much as a gustatory one: pastel scoops stacked high, rainbow sprinkles, neon pints lining freezer cases. Instead of pastels or sprinkles, OPAQUE arrives jet black. Made with cocoa, espresso fudge, and balsamic cherry, the flavor asks people to taste without visual cues. The familiar sweetness and richness are there, but hidden inside a form that looks more severe than playful. That shift forces a different kind of awareness, one that aligns with Hendry\u2019s larger body of work. <\/p>\n

This, of course, is what Hendry does best\u2014manipulating context, transforming the familiar into something uncanny and new. Just as her hyper-realistic drawings once made us reconsider a crumpled Herm\u00e8s bag or a handful of candy wrappers, here she asks us to reconsider ice cream \u2014 an object so ingrained in memory and culture \u2014 by making the ordinary suddenly unfamiliar.<\/p>\n

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For three days, Hendry and Jeni\u2019s hosted a monochrome ice cream shop in SoHo, where everything from the waffle cones to the walls was sable black. Inside, Hendry showcased seven new works created for the project, each playing with the same chromatic void, continuing her interest in how context changes our relationship to consumption. It\u2019s a stripped-down environment, one that highlights texture, form, and sensation over spectacle. Not silence exactly, but a removal of noise, a design gesture that amplifies sensation rather than diminishes it. <\/p>\n

Beth Stallings, Jeni’s director of innovation, calls the flavor \u201clayers deep\u2026an excavation of flavor,\u201d a sentiment that could easily apply to Hendry\u2019s artistic philosophy. Jeni\u2019s, long known for bringing painterly approaches to ice cream, seems the perfect collaborator for an artist whose practice is rooted in translating consumption into experience. Together, they\u2019ve reframed a product launch as a sensorial performance.<\/p>\n

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Hendry has long been interested in consumer culture, not in the cynical sense of critique, but in the earnest act of noticing. With OPAQUE, she\u2019s asking us to slow down and reconsider the transactions we rarely question. Ice cream, perhaps the most democratic of indulgences, becomes something more than a treat, an observation of how much of the experience is bound up in what we expect to see. By removing color, the collaboration makes the familiar feel new again.<\/p>\n

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We wanted to create an experience that pushes sensory boundaries. Removing color makes you feel everything else more deeply\u2014the texture, the taste, the emotion.<\/p>\n

Cj Hendry<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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In a world oversaturated with image and spectacle, Hendry and Jeni\u2019s created something startling in its restraint. Not about absence, but rather about presence, OPAQUE <\/em>encourages the presence of taste, of touch, of attention. A jet-black scoop that reminds us that sometimes, the less we see, the more we feel.<\/p>\n

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The post Jeni\u2019s Ice Cream X Cj Hendry Explore the Art of Absence<\/a> appeared first on PRINT Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been following Cj Hendry\u2019s work since 2013, when she was drawing in black and white pen with painstaking precision. Back then, her focus was on surface and detail. Over the years, I\u2019ve watched Hendry push her practice outward, moving from colored pencils into immersive experiences that swallow you whole, each new project less about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1972"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2011,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions\/2011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}