Jessica Stockholder

Jessica Stockholder’s exuberant museum installations have brought her significant international recognition. Her bold use of colour and spatial reach, the rich and surprising combination of domestic materials such as carpet and plastic containers, and careful execution combined with wild wit all make legitimate the prominence she has earned. The smaller pieces so well chosen and installed for this exhibition at the Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto share these qualities, but alter the scale. As in a greenhouse, a laboratory, or perhaps a nursery, intimacy affords an opportunity to appreciate Stockholder’s unique processes of composition and how each work plays responsively with the space it inhabits, with its neighbours and with the viewer.

All but one work was untitled; all are from 2003 or 2004. A wall piece in two parts and Ground Cover Season Indoors, an expansive sculptural composition that abuts inside (artificial lighting, a chair with a cushion, an almost black monochrome painted on the wall) to outside (an elaborately festooned park bench), bracket the show. Others use both the wall and floor to convey their vital formalities. They are highly coloured, funky in their combination of materials and theatrical. Stockholder joins form with colour intuitively, yet there is a casual control at work. Her objects change as we move around them because she adroitly ensures that differences will appear. In one, only a single view of a chair/desk ensemble displays the pink pigment that seems to have flowed onto the chair from a spill on the desk above. But there is no connection between these accidents. There are no accidents at all. The hue of the paint on the desk is different and it hasn’t quite dripped through the irregular hole. From another angle, this little drama is invisible. “Restraint” would seem like the last word to use in describing Stockholder’s work, but it is apposite.

The visual pleasure in looking at these sculptures intersects with the artist’s evident joy in arranging colour, materials and light in ways that both create an individual environment and set up a conversation with what is already there in the space. These pieces were not designed for this setting, yet they infiltrate themselves revealingly into what is a largely generic commercial gallery context. They play with the white walls, the even lighting, the commodities on offer. What makes Stockholder’s masterly manipulations more than surface fun is the perhaps surprising access her work gives to an understanding of what I would call visual “articulation.” She claimed in a 1991 interview that she hopes to bring herself and us “closer to thinking processes as they exist before the idea is fully formed.” Each work here appears realized yet still in potential flux. Objects, colours, ideas join and remake one another in front of our eyes. The “language” is visual, but, as with the power cords and other ligaments that figure often in Stockholder’s work, connections to other systems of experience and meaning are always made possible.

Stockholders large work is famous for long, baffling titles. Her unforgettable installation at the Power Plant in Toronto in 1999 was called “First Cousin Once Removed or Cinema of Brushing Skin.” Thats relatively succinct for the artist. Initially she attempted simply to describe her temporary works with these elaborate sentences but then realized that the formulations that came to mind were, like the installations, allowing glimpses of associations working on a subconscious plane. Ground Cover Season Indoors is descriptive of the indoor/outdoor carpet featured, yet it is more profoundly evocative. At this subcutaneous grade, for her and I suspect for everyone, visual and verbal languages collaborate, bend towards one another, articulate. The work calls up images and associations on a conscious horizon too, both textual and visual. Stockholder’s sculptures may not need verbal articulation, but they would not be hers without it. So, although the Sable-Castelli exhibition, like most of her others, was untitled, it deserves a hook such as “Visual Pleasure and Narratives of Abstraction.”

Stockholder’s installations, large or small, are not abstract in the usual art-historical ways. They revel in using real wood, plastic, towels and the like. Hanging pieces escape framing. Colour seems heightened for decorative effect. There is no reduction of means, and theatricality replaces any quest for a Greenbergian specificity of medium. It’s easy to see why Stockholder claims Matisse as one of her inspirations. But you can see glancing allusions to conventions of abstraction in most of these sculptures, beginning with the denomination Untitled. In one case, a piece of wood with an orange monochrome field leans against a low, half-black, half-purple table that looks sufficiently industrial to have pleased Donald Judd (before it was painted). The wall piece anatomizes the gesture of the hand and brush as a convention of expressionist painting. Cut-up photographs also cross the gilded frame here and epitomize flights from convention. Colour fields act out small plays of history Was that an Ellsworth Kelly that fell off the wall and ended up in a new shape, draped over a fold of blue carpet? And as much as we might all wish that a black square could just be a black square, the ghost of Malevich’s four black monochromes cannot be denied his (or is it now “her”?) appearance in Ground Cover Season Indoors. This apparition is tethered to the present and to the passing contemplation befitting the park bench. Stockholder runs 16 colour-coordinated bungee cords (yellow, black and one red, all with flecks that carry the eye from one tie to another) between the wall and seat in a mock-up, or mockery, of the radiating lines in a diagram of one-point perspective. These lines of sight extend to define a new but as yet unpainted square, primed to overlap Malevich’s.

Stockholder does not emphasize this set of associations, nor any other. The pleasures of looking, manipulating, projecting dominate and are surely responsible for the accolades she rightly receives for her work. Her sculptures are serious fun. ■

“Jessica Stockholder,” curated by Barbara Edwards, was on exhibit at the Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto from June 5 to July 10, 2004.

Mark Cheetham is a freelance curator and a professor in the Graduate Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. He is completing a book on abstract art since the 1960s titled Against Autonomy.