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Jessica Hutchins
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
CASV has partnered with Malaspina Printmakers to present a public artist lecture with Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Please join us on Tuesday March 15th at 7:30. The talk will be held on in room 285 in the North Building at Emily Carr Campus on Granville Island. Jackson’s work is currently on display untill April 11th in the group exhibition Surface Tension at Malaspina Printmakers in Granville Island.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins is a Portland, Oregon-based artist whose mixed media works explore conditions of beauty, vulnerability, transformation, and daily rituals. An MFA graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hutchins will open a solo exhibition at the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA, in April 2011. She recently participated in the group exhibitions, The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, and The 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She is currently showing her work in Surface Tension, at Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver, BC. Hutchins is represented by Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York.
Ben Davis of artnet.com wrote of J.J. Hutchins:
“The 2010 Whitney Biennial has produced at least one new star — Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971), an artist based in Portland, Ore. Whether they loved it or hated it, Hutchins’ Couch for a Long Time — a couch, papered with newspaper clippings about Barack Obama, with two rather pathetic ceramic vessels standing in for human figures atop it — was the one work that all the critics mentioned in their reviews of that exhibition. Perhaps this is because Couch for a Long Time nailed together the two strands that run throughout the 2010 Biennial: a sort of distracted leftish sentiment, on the one hand, and an inward-looking formalism, on the other. Hutchins’ couch is also, in my opinion, a pleasantly weird work to look at.
“Hutchins’ under-produced, “unmonumental” work shares some of the “so wrong it’s right” esthetic of Rachel Harrison’s sculpture. But the junk-sale feel, the deliberately awkward combinations of objects, the half-buried but knowing anthropomorphic references, the “flat-bed picture” plane, the scraps of newspaper collage, the sly puns — all these qualities suggest a more primal predecessor: Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg is pretty much an Old Master by now, so the echo explains why Hutchins’ exhibitions have an almost classical feeling to them, despite the general messiness. Her gawky art may fit right in line with what Hal Foster recently argued was the characteristic avant-garde spirit of ‘00s art, “precariousness” — but it nevertheless feels quite settled.”
