Barbara Rita Jenny wants to "cause some change in how we look at things."

Even further, she questions, "Do we look at things?"

Merging these questions with a fascination with the universal body, birth, cellular regeneration and technological amenities is the core of Jenny's conceptual exploration in digital imagery, a medium defying rigid definition and evading mainstream endorsements.

Jenny, recently recognized as a 2005 Fellow by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts for her artistic excellence and commitment, was trained in the medium of painting. She received her BFA from Dartmouth College in 1988 and went on to study studio art and critical theory at Maine College of Art, earning her MFA in 2002.

She enjoyed the investigative process of painting, but the process eventually became an obstacle in and of itself.

"With painting, I needed at least eight hours in my studio, or I felt like it wasn't worth it," she says. Jenny would stand back from her paintings as she smoked and considered the course of her works in progress. Now the non-smoking mother of a 6-year-old, she no longer can afford the eight-hour stretch of cigarette-driven creativity and laughingly refers to her digital process of the last four years as "very family friendly." Starting with digital images she's captured-of her own body, a friend's Caesarian scar, her son's lips-she allocates half-hour segments of time for the purpose of flipping, twisting, rotating and multiplying these images, creating baffling patterns of human skin in various hues, forms, and somewhat foreign compositions. "I'm using a collage-like, painterly process, only on my desktop rather than an easel," she says. "It's still a very tactile, physical process of creation for me."

Though she passes hours alone in front of the computer screen, projects and installations are a collaborative effort. Fabric Artisan, a company specializing in printing on Lycra, assisted with her installation piece, "SkinCrawl," in Portland's Space Gallery, which features a vision of patterned linoleum, underneath which an incredibly slow-moving lump is only perceptible when viewers look long and closely enough. Portsmouth Upholstery facilitated the printing for the butterfly chair in Jenny's piece "SkinTeriorDezine," giving Jenny the details on how the material had to breathe, what weight it had to be, what would work and what was impossible. LifeSize Graphics in Portsmouth helps with printing. "It is not a solitary process in the end," Jenny notes.

Digital imagery became the means for Jenny to create work "intentionally rather than inquisitively." As a painter, Jenny was continually seeking meaning within her imagery, but the sincerity of the digital image provided an immediacy and directness.

"The digital macroscopic capture became a way for me to make images that are at once detailed and vague," Jenny explains, allowing for experimentation with the photographs of hands, belly buttons, scars, stretch marks, and mouths, such as in "Suckle," which suggests the presence of lips, albeit stretched to the perplexing proportions of a multi-hued diamond.

The ultimate images Jenny constructs are both pleasantly pretty designs and bewilderingly unfamiliar folds, crevices and protrusions. You might recognize the humanness of the work, identifying skin as the instrumental imagery, yet the patterns Jenny creates elicit a response akin to squeamishness. You clearly identify the head of a penis, then find yourself somewhat bewildered when Jenny denies such imagery, confirming that it is, in fact, simply the manipulated image of a hand.

"Viewers tend to literally do a back and forth dance with my work. From afar, one is seduced by what seems like a decorative pattern, but when you draw near, and you realize the imagery is of skin, you begin to wonder, 'What skin? From what part of the body? Is this sexy or sexual?'" Jenny says.

Jenny's seductive duality begs the question of impropriety. One of Jenny's students at Phillips Exeter Academy (where Jenny was an art instructor for 10 years), having seen her exhibit, "Subtle Bodies" at the Lamont Gallery in Exeter, admitted to feeling a little bit "dirty" as a spectator. Another student was so distracted by the images that Jenny politely hid them away when meeting the student in her office.

British photographer John Coplans, one of many influences Jenny cites in her artistic explorations, is recognized mainly for his unfavorable self-portraits, which unabashedly revealed his naked, aging body without his head or feet included in the imagery. Though the medium is somewhat different and the representation significantly more direct, the viewers' analogous reaction is one of marked discomfort at the human body's vulnerable exhibition. Jenny also mentions Louise Bourgeois, whose anthropomorphic sculptures and installation pieces continually reference the male and female bodies, sexuality, tension, copulation and desire. Bourgeois' work is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, causing us to feel ineffably discomforted by a body-less set of clasped hands or a huge bronze spindle-legged spider meant to represent the protection and labor of femininity.

Barbara Rita Jenny's work is not necessarily photography, nor is it sculpture or strictly based on installation. Most galleries aren't sure where to place her work, how to define it. Like Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's photographs resembling pink marbleized floors, created from ham, salami and bologna assemblages or his massive, incredible intestinal system he simply dubbed "a shit machine," Jenny's work is conceptually anarchic, contemplating Posthumanism, sexuality, perception of the body, and internal and external meanderings. It cannot fit into a living room and, much of the time, it cannot be framed.

"I want people to think about that, that not everything sits on a pedestal or is framed to hang on a wall. I'm trying to push that question-does it have to be labeled?" she says.

On Thursday, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. at the Portsmouth Public Library's "Conversations With Artists," hear Barbara Rita Jenny speak about contemporary art that conveys, instills or inspires hope, a characteristic her work addresses in seeking to question the standard notions of beauty while revering the astounding capabilities of our collective human body.

Rebecca Cox is interviewing a series of Seacoast area artists to learn about their influences and their creative process.