Jessica Stockholder, 2009, courtesy of artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, New York. Photo by Maggie Nimkin.
Jessica Stockholder
February 12–May 29
Indoor gallery hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tue–Fri, noon–5 p.m. Sat & Sun
12580 Rott, 314-615-5278, laumeier.org
Last year, sculptor Jessica Stockholder installed “Flooded Chambers Maid” on Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn in New York. It was a waterfall of white-and-turquoise bleachers, facing an arrow-shaped platform patchworked from blue, red, orange, pink, white, green, and yellow geometric panels. In one spot, the installation wrapped around a tree; it had a layer of blue rubber mulch underneath. And it naturally attracted grubby little hands and tiny sneakers (park employees even rescued a toy dump truck from the mulch). By the end of its run, it was all scuffed up. That was unintentional, but it delighted Stockholder—which tells you a lot about her as an artist. So do her materials, which range from fabricated metal to plastic flea-market furniture to halogen light bulbs. This month, she brings two exhibits to Laumeier under the waggish title “Grab grassy this moment your I’s,” including a rejiggered “Flooded” in the Children’s Sculpture Garden and 10 sculptures in the indoor galleries. Stockholder gives an artist’s talk on February 12 prior to the opening reception, which runs from 5 to 7 p.m., and she is collaborating on an artist’s book with TOKY Branding + Design and local poet Mary Jo Bang.
Web Exclusive: A Conversation With Jessica Stockholder and Mary Jo Bang
As part of her exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Grab grassy this moment your I’s, sculptor Jessica Stockholder collaborated with local poet, Mary Jo Bang, on a book—or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a project. It’s not a show catalog; it’s not quite an “artist’s book” either. It is its own thing, the result of a triangular collaboration between the artists and TOKY Branding + Design, who combined the pictures and words to make a singular object. See the book—and Stockholder—in person when Grassy opens February 12, and she delivers an artist’s talk. Here are words from both women about the process of working together, and their individual processes as artists.
Jessica Stockholder on her large outdoor work, Flooded Chambers Maid:
There’s a planted area that’s redesigned in relation to the topography of that piece of land. It’s also a little bigger, which is nice, because I think it got a little squished at Madison Square Park. And at the park, there was a shape described with rubber mulch that wasn’t really very practical, because little kids loved to play with it, and it ended up scattered all over the place, and had to be tended pretty aggressively. So we cast a concrete pad instead. We stained it, and it’s gotten bleached, so we’re going to paint it again in the spring. At Madison Square Park, there were very different audiences for the work at different times of day. In the morning, lots of nannies and parents would bring little kids to play in the park, and they’d be all over the piece. At lunch, it was all office workers sitting on it and eating lunch. It changed a lot through the day. [At Laumeier] I think it will be all kinds of people. Though it’s officially the Children’s Garden down there, it’s not such an enormous park that people only go to one section of it. So I think it will have all kinds of audience there.
Mary Jo Bang, on Flooded Chambers Maid:
With the poem that goes with Flooded Chambers Maid, one of the first things I thought of when I saw that piece was a beach ball, because there are those super-saturated blues and reds that you see on those old beach balls. By putting the beach ball into that poem, then that I think is a way of convincing the reader that even though this poem is dealing with things outside of the piece, yes, it really does belong to it, and was triggered by the piece, and it feels like there is a relationship.
Stockholder, on the sculptures that will be on view in the indoor galleries:
It’s a collection of work, much of it comes from a show that I had in New York last year. I just so happened that the work from that show, the scale of those pieces was really good for the scale of the galleries at Laumeier. For the most part, there’s one work for each room. In a way, maybe there’s kind of a landscape feel to some of them. One of them particularly. And then one of the pieces is a new piece from my studio that hasn’t been shown. They’re not narrative; they’re very visual.
Mary Jo Bang, on writing out of Stockholder’s work:
I spent a lot of time just familiarizing myself with the images. Often, my poems tend to have some kind of very loose sense of a narrative. So there are speakers who come on stage and say things, or indicate a set design of some kind. So for instance, there’s one [sculpture] that had a stand. Suddenly, I saw a hospital, because there are those stands that have a tray that comes up over the bed. Little things like that would suggest a setting. Then I would just take off from that. The poem that got paired with that is called “The Hospital.” It starts out, “I’m sick, or so they say/the white wall has an eggshell effect from the light/ through the window, escaping the blinds.” What’s funny is there was another image that, when I came near to finishing a set of these, could go with this poem. So in fact, the poems aren’t married completely to the image until the end, when I say it is, and then forever after, it is. But I remained fluid as far as assigning one of these to a different image. Some of them were written for a particular piece, and I never considered assigning it to another image. But a couple of them could have worked very well with more than one image. Then, in the end, I decided on a particular thing.
Stockholder, on her working process:
I took piano lessons briefly when I was a kid, and watching musicians play instruments, when you’re playing the piano you can’t think about every finger pressing every key. My process is a bit like that. I have a sense of what I’m doing, but I can’t be thinking about the details and the why I’m doing each and every little thing, because it would never happen. For me, that’s what intuition means. Using your intelligence in a way that you haven’t yet put words to.
Bang, on seeing the prototype of the book:
In some ways, it’s a departure from the way poems are usually presented because they [TOKY] would, on the page, pick a line that would enlarge. And maybe even isolate by putting a double space after it, and then they would color that line. What it does, you have your title at the top, and then you have part of the poem, and then you have this big maybe yellow or blue line that looks like a title, because it becomes isolated, and it’s larger, the font size is larger. But it’s kind of fun to read it that way, as if you begin something and now, in the same poem, you’re reintroduced the poem. So I actually thought it was a lot of fun. It’s not 8.5-by-11. It’s bigger than half that, but only slightly, maybe 5-by-7. The paper is actually plastic. It gives it a substantial feeling, and you don’t have text or image bleeding through the page, or showing through behind it. Yet, they’re not glossy. They have more almost photographic matte quality.
Stockholder, on materials:
For the last few years, I’ve used a lot of plastic things. I think partly there’s been more plastic around, all kinds of different colors and kinds of plastic materials. I really like the color of the plastic, and I also find that there’s something kind of painful and sad about the fact that it’s so temporary and not valued as it moves through our houses. So it’s kind of a bittersweet quality in the work. One of the pieces, it’s got a black piece of plastic in a frame with some transparent plastic next to it, that piece I’m really interested in the surface, the black plastic is a kind of very matte, almost waxy feeling. And transparent pieces are both transparent and kind of shiny, and there’s a Plexiglas piece there that’s scratched, so it’s about the surface quality of those materials. The work altogether is about surface, insofar as it’s about painting and picture making and composition that’s both stuck to the material and separate from the material. I don’t tend to think about the materials as what they function as, and I like that. There’s a gap between what the things are in one context, what they were intended for, in terms of somebody else’s manufacture, and then I’m using them for other reasons having to do with how they’re made, what color they are, what they feel like.
Mary Jo Bang, on writing poems out of visual art (i.e., ekphrasis):
The first time I saw the images, Kim [Humphries] sent me some, to tell me about Jessica’s work and to see if I would be interested in writing from them. He didn’t know, at the time, which images would be in the show. So they were just to give me an idea of the kind of work, and I was very excited by them, and liked them very, very much. I liked especially their openness in terms of writing ekphrastic poems. The way I usually use art is to use it as a tripwire to allow myself to depart from the actual circumstances that might be in the work itself. So in some ways, a work that’s abstract or non-representational is most exciting, because it’s the kind of thing where you might be looking at the clouds and you can see an elephant, and then you think, no I’m going to erase that image and see a giraffe. Just by blinking you can make your own images.
I have a book of ekphrastic poems [From the Eye Like a Strange Balloon], so I have this kind of developed sense of starting with the work and going off, so I think that made it easier for me than if I hadn’t had that experience of having done that with a lot of different kinds of art.
On working with Mary Jo Bang:
I think what I found interesting was that she does think in terms of narrative and stories. I don’t, for the most part. But I think the way in which she plays with narrative, they way in which one thought jumps to another, which might be unrelated in many ways but has a kind of tenuous relatedness in one quirky particular way. That way of jumping in thought is quite related to my use of material. And the way in which a word can be multivalent, I think that is true of materials, too. Our processes are quite aligned in that way.
I’ve appreciated what she’s done with the narrative. It’s not something I do, but I really appreciate how she’s constructed narrative both jumping off from what the materials are and from what the work feels like, and those are very different ways to approach the work. And she’s done both. It’s really nice to do something that resonated with St. Louis, instead of trying to make it some dry, intellectual thing that pounces from nowhere!
