Jessica Jackson Hutchins
dal 21/2/2010 al 27/3/2010
Segnalato da
21/2/2010
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Laurel Gitlen Small A Projects, New York
Over Come Over. She employs hand-formed ceramic vessels, household furniture and collage to articulate sculptural forms that interrogate the space between the banal and the sublime. Patently abstract, the works in this exhibition all point indirectly toward figurative forms. Some pieces originate with furnishings taken from the artist's home, which invests them with both an emotional urgency and an acute specificity.
Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) is pleased to present Over Come Over, a solo
exhibition of new work by Jessica Jackson Hutchins.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins employs hand-formed ceramic vessels, household furniture
and collage to articulate sculptural forms that interrogate the space between the
banal and the sublime. Her sculptures and collages put found objects and familiar
materials in conversation, resulting in poetic abstractions where aggregate forms
transcend the immediacy of their common parts. The insistent materiality of her
sculptures and their raw surfaces yields to a humor and intimacy that solicits an
empathic response in the viewer.
Patently abstract, the works in this exhibition all point indirectly toward
figurative forms. Some pieces originate with furnishings taken from the artist’s
home, which invests them with both an emotional urgency and an acute specificity.
These care-worn domestic objects bear the familiar marks and dents of encounters
with bodies and things; casual imperfections that humanize them. In other pieces,
Hutchins pulls prints and casts impressions directly from furniture: She makes
collages on prints that capture the carved and inked surface of a dining-room
table, and two sculptures assume the bulky mass of an old green arm chair.
The two chair-forms take on the general shape and presence of the absent furniture,
and are thus scaled in a specific relation to the viewer’s body. In Leaning Figure,
an ochre-pigmented and newspaper-collaged mass resting against the wall is
comically perched on top of a too-short bench. Two irregular ceramic vessels are
placed on top of this totemic stack and a small ripped patch of faded denim
indicates the general vicinity of a right knee. In another, Last Unicorn, the same
chair inspires a white plaster cone that is a joyful, colorful fabric-adorned base
for a fluted ceramic bowl and a ceramic mortar and pestle.
The use of ceramics in the work simultaneously signifies domestic utility and the
realm of historical artifacts. But Hutchins’ vessels also generate metaphors for
bodies and body parts (both literal and fantastic) as regenerative or spiritual
containers. Hutchins’ expansive vocabulary is deeply invested in the innate human
ability to recognize and associate with others and objects, and Disgraced Skater, a
richly glazed red ceramic sculpture, furthers this interest in human pathos. This
propped and lumpen form depicts a slumping athlete and thus becomes yet another
monument in her work (other specific subjects in Hutchins’ oeuvre include Darryl
Strawberry, Kurt Cobain and Tiger Woods) to collective compassion and human
frailty.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins will be included in 2010: The Whitney Biennial and was
recently featured in Dirt on Delight which traveled to the ICA Philadelphia and The
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She will also have a solo show at Derek Eller
Gallery, which runs February 19-March 27, 2010. Hutchins lives and works in
Portland, Oregon. This is her third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Image: Untitled (Table Collage), 2009
Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects)
261 Broome Street New York, NY 10002
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 12 to 6 and by appointment