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The American/Canadian artist Jessica Stockholder is known for site-specific works that challenge established boundaries, institutional and formal. Her work straddles many disciplinary lines, and she employs a range of materials and techniques. A recurring theme is the use of multiple, layered images to create micro-spaces within one’s field of vision, pulling apart the pictorial frame so as to include the larger context around it. As with her more well-known work, there is almost always an element of the objet trouvé. The mash-up of the intentional and the arbitrary is one of many organizing principles Stockholder employs in all of her works.
In her first edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, “Choices,” these mainstays of Stockholder’s celebrated work are on full display. The archival pigment print presents a picture of a warped photograph that captures the shine of the original photograph even as it is printed on mat paper. The photo includes an oil painted printer, bits and pieces of paper, fabric, mirror, and tile. The space evoked by the stacked images is disrupted by a tear running through to the middle of the image. On top of this photographic collage, Stockholder has placed a drawn and cut-out hand, which together with the image of a foot that enters at the bottom left corner of the photograph, insists that the human body, and the handmade, be absorbed together with the manufactured objects imaged. As with!many of Stockholder’s larger-scale pieces, this image evokes a radical opening, to the world, and to us as viewers.
