Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jessica Stockholder
American, Canadian; 20th-century, 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Kavi Gupta Gallery (Exhibition: Matter of Fact: Material as a Political Act)
74%
Superior Strength Stack. 2015. Rope, label, acrylic paint, metal tray, hairdryer part, furniture legs, mylar, wooden furniture base, and MDF pedestal
Found-object sculptures have to contend with the readymade significances of their found-object parts. Should my viewer's experience (says an assemblage to itself) be affected by the quotidian values of the many little things that make me up, or should I serve up a higher unity through my overall structure that quashes the meanings of all my constituent items? This sculpture of Stockholder's prevaricates on just this point, but it's okay because this prevarication becomes the sculpture's aesthetic substance. That is, what you experience when you experience this artwork is its unwillingness either to efface its components in the name of sculptural wholeness, or to preserve any of the natural worldly associations one might have with its rope, cabinetry, dinnertrays, etc. This unwillingness itself becomes the ground of your aesthetic experience. You'll find yourself relishing the weird relation between that bold orange and the cream-yellow block that's resting atop it, but then you'll have to interrupt yourself to wonder why the pedestal is sitting on top of the sculpture? And then again why's there even more sculpture on top of the pedestal that's resting atop a pedestal that isn't a pedestal? And why does the top segment of the sculpture comprise even more stuff that's upholding other stuff though it looks like it shouldn't be? This is all to say that none of the found objects are very much altered in physical terms, but all of them have been completely employed with a new sculptural function that bereaves them of any connections to their normal usefulness. This is funny, and it keeps you looking. (TFS, 2025)
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art (Exhibition: Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories)
48%
Assist #3 A Chord. 2015. Painted metal, ratchet clamp with yellow webbing, felt, strap, modified vending machine entitled Immergence (2010) by Patrick Killoran on loan from Hyde Park Art Center
The work is a non-freestanding metal sculpture that requires strapping to some other object to stay upright and thereby be artistically "completed." As I understand it, it's up to whoever installs the work (not necessarily the artist) to choose that secondary object. In this case it's another artist's modified-found-object sculpture. As a conceptual gambit, the "assist" thing is not very strong, or to be more precise, it's vague. What exactly is the artwork articulating/focalizing/transforming: Stockholder's construction, the thing it's attached to, or the combination of the two? If the first, why not just make a regular freestanding sculpture? If the second, why this combinatory method and not one of the million other ways to conceptually remix and refocus reality? If the third, why foreground the "assist" dimension, which turns the piece into primarily an idea about interdependency and only secondarily into a physiognomic thing? The other way around might have better suited the artwork. Another way of framing this whole gripe would be to say that it's not sufficient for art to point out that significance seeps from context, but to do so in ways that are somehow not reducible to the act of pointing. Pointing by way of a bulky metal grated appendage on a coke machine is a pretty inelegant way to point. (And even on its own terms there's something irksome about Stockholder's sculpture as a sculpture. The thinness and the shininess of the metal is coy; the colors are indulgent — there's something about these properties that associate with Chicago art in the 2010s, à la Claire Ashley or Robert Burnier [the latter of whom is better than this]. There is something to be said, though, for the airiness of it all.) (TFS, 2025)