Jessica Stockholder | Louisiana Museum
Interview by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
“I’m using stuff as I would use a color from a paint tube.”
We met artist Jessica Stockholder for a talk about why stuff, as she puts it, matters. “I think stuff is a better word than objects for me.”
Jessica Stockholder | Los Angeles Times | by David Pagel
Jessica Stockholder, Digital Thoughts, Installation View at 1301PE , 2020
Imagine an astronaut on the International Space Station. Then imagine her staying up late, making things with her hands and blocking the video transmissions that allow her colleagues on Earth to monitor her 24/7.
The freedom she feels is palpable as you wander through “Digital Thoughts,” Jessica Stockholder’s laser-sharp exhibition at 1301PE gallery in L.A. Each of Stockholder’s 11 inventive assemblages is out of this world — if not from another planet then at least from far out in space.
Some of Stockholder’s constellations of unrelated objects and materials are no bigger than notepads. Some are large, about the size of tents or picnic tables.
Four hang on the wall like paintings. One stands on the floor like an ad hoc end table. Most do both, forming painterly and sculptural hybrids that defy gravity and blur the boundaries between 2-D images and 3-D objects. Most make an intellectual mess of the idea that art is best when its various media are kept separate — and supposedly equal.
Jessica Stockholder | Tablet Magazine | By Jeremy Sigler
To marvel at a work by Jessica Stockholder is not only to examine her unorthodox assembly of the world’s kit, but to wonder where on earth she shops—where she gets such good deals? Her unconventional art supplies seem to either descend from outer space, or crawl up out of dumpsters. It’s as if junk—be it new or used—has no other purpose than to animate her dystopian sculptural choreography.
One imagines Stockholder stocking up, as it were. Like a chef instinctively sniffing out the freshest ingredients (the tackiest kitschiest artifacts), she’s confident that in time the right idea for their incorporation will come.
I imagine her throwing back a shot of absinthe and embarking on an epic trip to the 99-cent store, in the same 1970s, American-made station wagon (boat) my mom used to drive—a postmodern suburban flâneur, experiencing what Walter Benjamin experienced in Paris (albeit by foot): a fetishistic fix. When the world goes on sale, it’s Stockholder who will have all the coupons.
Indeed, at its root, her process is as decadent as a department store. Picture Rooney Mara seduced by Cate Blanchett in the opening scene of Todd Haynes’ Carol. Or conversely the subtle pathos of a scene in Frederick Wiseman’s The Store (1983) where an average working man, out to please his wife, gets up-sold by a very cunning mink dealer in a Neiman Marcus in Dallas.
And while I’m a less-is-more kind of guy, when it comes to Stockholder, I make an exception. Notwithstanding, when I received a press release in my inbox for her upcoming exhibition all the way across the Atlantic Ocean—that massive ditch filled with salt water, a few fish, and a wad of plastic bags about the size of Brazil—in the old Dutch province of Utrecht, I was a tinge skeptical.
The world has changed since the last time I checked in with Stockholder. And even though I have always admired her “giant steps,” my mood has sobered, and I’d say I’ve lost my stride and swagger. When I read her show’s title, Stuff Matters, and skimmed the Centraal Museum’s PR material, I felt growing anxiety about the deeply contaminated world we now live in.
Jessica Stockholder | Los Angeles Times | By Christopher Knight
Jessica Stockholder, "White Light Laid Frozen," 2005, mixed media
In a resurrection myth from ancient Greece, the powerful god Apollo accidentally kills Hyacinth, a beautiful Spartan prince, when a playful game of throwing a metal discus goes tragically awry. The mortal youth, struck in the forehead, dies in his divine lover’s arms
Later reborn as a notably phallic spring flower to assuage Apollo’s grief, Hyacinth, a representation of cycles of decay and renewal, makes an excellent motif for an anniversary celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The renowned institution has had its troubles for the last decade, both financially and in terms of leadership. But as its 40th birthday rolls around, MOCA wants its public to know that the calamities are past. A new flowering is underway.
Centraal Museum Utrecht
19 April - 1 September 2019
This summer, Centraal Museum presents Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters. Jessica Stockholder (USA 1959) came to fame in the early 1990s with colourful and picturesque as well as monumental installations. In her work, Stockholder combines all sorts of everyday items – ranging from umbrellas and cushions to furniture and lamps – to form an overwhelming composition. Through her playful manipulation of form and colour, she is able to transform the entire room.
With her open-minded approach to the world, Stockholder aims to disrupt our usual view of the items and materials that surround us daily, and to subvert our notions regarding what’s worthwhile and worthless.
In this exhibition, Jessica Stockholder acts as both artist and curator. In addition to a retrospective of her oeuvre, she applies her unique perspective to select objects from the museum’s various collections. The exhibition Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters will run from 19 April to 1 September 2019.
Installation view: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center
Jessica Stockholder
Relational Aesthetics
The Contemporary Austin
Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701
September 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Props, Assists and Situations: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin
The promotional photographs for Relational Aesthetics, Jessica Stockholder’s show at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center, share some compelling features with the works themselves — they confuse the eye. It’s no accident.
“I don’t think in volume,” Stockholder says, “I think graphically.” The sculptures themselves are described not as installations, but as three-dimensional paintings, or in some cases, “situations.” Stockholder’s propensity for working from a graphic, two-dimensional idea creates an interesting life cycle to the work, which transitions repeatedly from two-dimensional thought experiment to a three-dimensional model from which a full-scale work is rendered, and then to documentation photographs. In most instances this last phase might feel like convention, or bureaucratic necessity, but with these works, one wonders if the resulting images are actually nearer the artist’s original impulse than the structures themselves. Or perhaps it’s just another iteration of a persistent theme in Stockholder’s work — every element’s success is dependent on another element.
Stockholder routinely manipulates a viewer’s perception of space though materiality and composition, and refers to many of her works in Relational Aesthetics as “assists.” These forms range from bundles of sticks to unwieldy sheets of metal that appear to be waving in the wind, or heavy-gauge metal screens supporting miniature works of art by other artists. Each of these assists are in turn supported by a prop, which is strange reversal of expectation — or is it function, or is it semantics?
By Tatiana Ryckman
Jessica Stockholder: Door Hinges, 2018.
Jessica Stockholder
Relational Aesthetics
The Contemporary Austin
Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701
September 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019
This exhibition of the work of the Chicago-based artist Jessica Stockholder (American-Canadian, born 1959 in Seattle, Washington, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia) spans both of The Contemporary Austin’s sites, with an indoor exhibition on the first floor of the downtown Jones Center on Congress Avenue and a new outdoor sculpture commission, Save on select landscape & outdoor lighting: Song to mind uncouples, 2018, at the entryway to Laguna Gloria.
Bringing painting into three-dimensional space, Stockholder blends an interest in site-specificity with color, form, and abstraction to yield meaning. Everyday objects become building materials alongside the surrounding architecture and environment. As the artist’s first solo presentation in Texas in over a decade, Jessica Stockholder: Relational Aesthetics includes a vibrant painted architectural installation, or “situation,” that doubles as a viewing platform and pedestal, newly created for the exhibition. A selection of new and recent sculptures, some of which incorporate discarded electronic elements, as well as a group of Stockholder’s Assists—hybrid assemblages that require an interchangeable, non-architectural support in order to stand up—are also on view.
Stockholder has invited the renowned First Nations sculptor, painter, and printmaker Robert Davidson (Haida, born 1946 in Hydaburg, Prince of Wales-Outer Ketchikan division, Alaska) to exhibit a selection of works within the Jones Center installation. Davidson’s Haida name is Guud San Glans, which means Eagle of the Dawn. He currently lives and works in White Rock near Vancouver and Massett in Haida Gwaii.
Phaidon is re-releasing Jessica Stockholder's monograph, as a revised and expanded edition. This title will begin to ship 11 June, 2018. Pre-order here.
Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.
Contributions have been made by the following authors: Germano Celant, Lynne Cooke, Barry Schwabsky, Jessica Stockholder, and Lynne Tillman.
Germano Celant is an internationally acclaimed author and curator acknowledged for his theories on Arte Povera.
Lynne Cook is the Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Barry Schwabsky writes regularly for Artforum. He is currently Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths' College in London.
Jessica Stockholder is an artist based in Chicago where she is Distinguished Service Professor, and Chair of the Visual Department at the University of Chicago.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic.
Jessica Stockholder, Chicago, "Assist #1", 2015. Painted metal, ratchet clamp with yellow webbing and felt, 74 by 90 by 48 in.
Jessica Stockholder
Great Lakes Research Initiative, FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art
Cleveland Institute of Art
Reinberger Gallery
11610 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106
14 July - 7 October, 2018
CLEVELAND, Ohio (Monday, May 14, 2018) – Twenty-one artists from cities surrounding the Great Lakes will have works on view in The Great Lakes Research, one of the many events that comprise FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.
The triennial is a summer-long exhibition of contemporary art from around the world taking place July 14 through September 30, 2018. The Great Lakes Research will continue to be on view through October 7, 2018 at the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Reinberger Gallery.
The Great Lakes Research exhibition follows a yearlong tour of artist studios in the region by FRONT Artistic Director Michelle Grabner. The exhibition considers a local geographic home within the context of the international exhibition, reclaiming regionalism as a vital means of identifying and prioritizing cultural centers.
The Great Lakes Research celebrates the curatorial practice of the studio visit, which reinforces the importance of local cultural fieldwork. In the process of selection, Grabner visited numerous studios to investigate and inform a group of works by artists who shape local and regional cultural patterns. Many of them have been pivotal as teachers and mentors informing the practices of young artists. They advance alternative geographic and theoretical positions and recognize regional discourses as legitimate while nurturing creative practices that work within a global framework.
Jessica Stockholder Installation, 2016.
1301PE is proud to recognize its artist, Jessica Stockholder, as one of the newest member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, class of 2018.
As part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' commitment to recognizing and celebrating excellence, 213 individuals in a wide range of disciplines and professions have been elected as members of the Class of 2018. Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists, and innovators and engages them in sharing knowledge and addressing challenges facing the world. The new members of the Academy were elected in 25 categories and are affiliated with 125 institutions.
"Membership in the Academy is not only an honor, but also an opportunity and a responsibility," said Jonathan Fanton, President of the American Academy. "Members can be inspired and engaged by connecting with one another and through Academy projects dedicated to the common good. The intellect, creativity, and commitment of the 2018 Class will enrich the work of the Academy and the world in which we live."
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, CT 06877
Honoring Jessica Stockholder
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Jessica Stockholder’s career in the visual arts now spans more than thirty years, including over seventy solo exhibitions worldwide and representation in numerous major public and private collections. Her work, which has had a significant impact on contemporary sculptural practice, is categorized by a deep love of color and a focused engagement with the intersection of pictorial space and the physicality of the material world. Stockholder first exhibited at The Aldrich in 1993, and in 2011 she presented Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood, a major solo exhibition based on the wood from a 130-year-old ash tree that had been removed from the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. Stockholder is also known for her writing on art and her commitment to teaching, which includes her appointment in 2012 as Chair of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago.
More information
Nasher Sculpture Center
360 Speaker Series: Jessica Stockholder
26 August 2017 2pm
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
Jessica Stockholder's sprawling constructions have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting and form and space. Within her work, the artist merges seemingly disparate, everyday objects to create holistic, colorful installations.
The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, installation view, 2016
Feeling gravity's pull: Jessica Stockholder's stacked works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash by Allison Young
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, Stockholder's current exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash emphasises process, form, and, above all, gravity. This is apparent in installations such as Sale A Way or Security Detail that feature slouched and hanging components.
However, the force is most integral to the artist's ongoing series of Assists – sculptures that cannot stand upright without the support of a given 'base'. Assist: Smoke and Mirrors, for instance – comprised of a web of copper wire, tarp and hardware parts – is buttressed by an upholstered chair; in a future iteration, it may instead come to lean on another sculpture or object. In the Assists, each component's mass, orientation and weight affect the stability of adjacent elements. Such works, perhaps, reflect the possibilities of both vulnerability and mutual dependence within our personal and civic lives.
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An installation view of Jessica Stockholder's show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Jessica Stockholder 'The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room' by KEN JOHNSON
Jessica Stockholder's colorful assemblages of diverse store-bought and found objects call to mind a term from neuroscience, "multisensory binding." The phrase refers to the fact that the outer world appears to us seamlessly coherent, despite the many sensory signals streaming in from diverse sources — eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Usually we don't notice how the mind binds together these different inputs. In Ms. Stockholder's engaging, if not wildly exciting, show of sculptures at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, your awareness of your attention's shifting between the disparate parts and the whole composition is essential.
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Installation view of Jessica Stockholder: The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room at
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (© Jessica Stockholder; Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes &
Nash, NY.)
Everyday Abstraction: A Q&A with Jessica Stockholder by Taylor Dafoe
Jessica Stockholder's work is difficult to talk about because it eschews so many of the typical classifications we use to discuss contemporary art: "installation," "site-specific," "ephemeral." Indeed, that's one of the most central elements of her practice: the dissolving of boundaries.
Look no further than her immersive new show at Mitchell Innes & Nash, "The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room." In it, multifaceted sculptures made from found items are installed sporadically throughout the space, calling into question what belongs with what. Discarded scallop shells rest atop blue ice cube trays. An old dance floor tile is mounted to the wall above sheets of industrial metal fencing. A sagging square of linoleum hangs from a rusty hinge. There are two new pieces from her "Assists" series — modular sculptures that can only stand upright when attached to something else: a car, a piano, or in this case, two threadbare lounge chairs the artist sourced from Craigslist. (Though, the furniture isn't technically a part of the sculpture: "If you buy an 'Assist' attached to a piano, you don't get the piano," Stockholder says.)
Finally the show's central work, the eponymous "The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room," features a large, winding, wooden stage connected to an elevated deck gallery-goers are encouraged to walk onto. Part sculpture, part viewing platform, part pedestal, it's easy to love, but hard to explain why.
While the installation was wrapping up in the gallery, Stockholder sat down with Artinfo to talk about the show and some of the larger themes that run throughout all her work.
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Installation view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich.
Jessica Stockholder: The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room
August 25 - October 1, 2016; Opening reception: Thursday, September 15, 6-8 pm
Mitchell-Innes & Nash: 534 W 26th Street, New York NY 10001
The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room will feature works from several facets of Stockholder's practice, including a large-scale site-responsive installation in addition to distinct bodies of studio works. This will be the gallery's third solo exhibition with the artist.
Color Jam Houston treats the intersection of Main and McKinney as a single public canvas. The stripes of color on the four corners seem to be woven together and present a kind of basket. The weaving of different stripes together into a single whole is resonant with the reality of different owners, jurisdictions and codes that govern this section of public space consisting of crosswalk, roadway, sidewalk, store fronts and Metro platform. The work also signifies the delicate social and political balance that exists between individual rights, freedoms, responsibilities and our collective well-being and coexistence.
Jessica Stockholder apparently hasn't had a solo outing in Chicago in over two decades, but she's certainly making up for lost time. The artist — known for bright assemblages of consumer goods and other materials — is now a professor and chair of the visual arts department at the University of Chicago. She opened "Door Hinges," an exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery, two weeks ago, and she curated a companion show, "Assisted," in the same space; a large new piece dangles from the ceiling of upscale, art-crowd-friendly Chicago restaurant mk; a site-specific piece is also now on view at the Smart Museum of Art.
At Kavi Gupta, pictured above and below, the artist goes big, conscripting a freezer unit, an enormous and clunky desk, and a Smart car into her installations. Another piece sprawls through the entrance foyer, combining energetic wall-painting with driveway safety-mirrors and other found objects; it continues on the second floor of the gallery, as well as on the space's exterior. Stockholder's facility with throwaway plastic consumer detritus — generating a buzz through the artful repurposing of toys, furniture, junk, and raw color — make her a kindred spirit to someone like Iza Genzken.
— Scott Indrisek
http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2015/09/22/jessica-stockholder-takes-chicago/
Jessica Stockholder: Rose's Inclination
September 12, 2015 – July 2, 2017
In a site-specific Threshold series installation, Jessica Stockholder intersects the Smart’s lobby with a wave of color and texture that climbs to the clerestory, cuts across the floor, and travels outwards into the Museum’s sculpture garden and beyond. Rose’s Inclination makes use of ordinary materials—lamps, paint, Plexiglas, carpet, and garden mulch—to “reach up and out,” altering the physical experience of the Smart Museum’s modernist architecture and landscaped courtyard. The work also repurposes a small section of the previous Threshold commission, a wall painting by Judy Ledgerwood, by agreement of both artists.
Stockholder is Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Art, The University of Chicago. Art21 deemed her “a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art.” Rose’s Inclination is her second public installation in Chicago since she arrived in 2011—the first being Color Jam (2012), which took over a busy intersection in the Loop and was one of the largest public art installations in the city’s history.
Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/jessica-stockholder-roses-inclination/