Artist: Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Exhibition title: No Relief
Venue: Adams and Ollman, Portland, US
Date: May 14 – June 25, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Adams and Ollman
Adams and Ollman is pleased to present No Relief, an exhibition of new ceramic sculptures and works on paper by Jessica Jackson Hutchins. No Relief will be on view at the gallery May 14 through July 25, 2022.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ expansive practice includes sculpture, painting, collage, video and installation. Well-known for her sprawling, layered sculptural assemblages composed of an array of everyday objects, some found, some personal, Hutchins explores and pushes materials, media, and meaning. The artist’s formally inventive works are accumulations of mundane rituals transformed into reverential objects that are as idiosyncratic as they are familiar. Through touch and accretion and utilizing form, color, and reference to illuminate the connections between ourselves, the world, and the generative interactions therein, Hutchins celebrates the meaning and emotion of relationships, time, and language.
For No Relief, Hutchins presents new mixed media works that recast the quotidian in thoughtful and evocative ways. Ceramic sculptures gesture towards recognizability—a head, a torso, or arm. The forms splay, lean, and flaunt their presence into the surrounding space, interacting with and implicating the viewer, while gestural glazes in earthy pinks, greens and browns build emotional intensity. At times they resemble broken ancient statuary, but instead of conjuring visions of an idealized past, Hutchins’ bodies—scarred, broken, and indented with the maker’s fingers—are situated in the present and speak rather to fragility, pathos, and imperfection. Hutchins’ approach to art-making allows for the sculptures to extend outward from objecthood and art history into other systems that organize our lives and thinking, along the way challenging hierarchies of form, materials, value and aesthetics.
Also on view is a new series of relief papier mâché works, made while the artist was in residence at Macdowell in early 2022. In these wall-based pieces, Hutchins returns to impulses of care and comfort, healing and repair that can be found in her early milagros sculptures—a toe for Darryl Strawberry, a tongue for Syd Barrett—and continue to drive her work. Hutchins fashions these mysterious relief abstractions using the humblest materials and yesterday’s news. She transforms the graphic qualities of language into abstractions that point to the fluidity, nuance, and impermanence of speech that often belie systems of codification. In Hutchins’ work, stability and authority are conceits that work to undermine, or at the very least obscure truth. In Blue Junction, a lumpy, asteroid-like shape tenuously bridges two sheets of paper, a formal reminder of the delicate connections that span worlds and meanings; in another work, an oversized tear summons personal and collective pain.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago, IL; lives and works in Portland, OR) has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, West Yorkshire, UK (2013); the Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2018), where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013); and The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2010). Her work is currently on view in Ceramics in the Expanded Field at MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA, and Working Thought at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, which includes a major new site specific glass installation. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. In 2022, Hutchins was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2020, received the Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College, OH, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
