Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials—bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock. Bringing the vibrant, Technicolor plastic products of consumer culture to her work, she later adds painted areas of bright purple, turquoise, pink, orange and green, calibrating each color for maximum optical and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures, and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire.
Born in Seattle, Washington, and trained at Yale University, Jessica Stockholder creates architectural scenarios and sculptural assemblages of a highly pictorial quality. Her work fuses found objects—ranging from construction materials to furniture and textiles, as well as everyday discarded household items. Stockholder’s work challenges the distinction between painting and sculpture, object and environment, decorative beauty and practical use. Her series of freestanding assemblages begun in 1988 with Kissing the Wall aesthetically inscribe themselves somewhere between home and Home Depot by introducing an air of animated domesticity and privacy into the anonymity of the gallery. Physically and emotionally engaging, they are exuberant visual essays on notions of private and public spheres and the conflation of private and public consumption.
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