An artwork, stretched yet steadfast, lies solitary in Albisola, a resonating, yet silent space, it is both cradle and promise of expansion. In the realm of imagination and senses, this installation project unfolds in steadfast alignment with the path that Jessica Stockholder’s artistic exploration has traced over the years. It resonates with the radical and hybrid essence of her entire body of work.
Stockholder’s works can be conceived of as spatialized paintings or wandering canvases, combining objects, painted or intrinsic color fields, fabrics, threads, diverse elements and devices, that together create a bold chromatic itinerary.
Colour itself floods throughout engaging multiple paths of expression, challenging boundaries between the concepts of artwork and exhibition space, as well as between painterly and physical experience. The creation of meaning and perceptual construction remains fluid and evolving, shifting from the visual field to a purely spatial and bodily ground and vice versa, incorporating the floor, the walls, the air and the energetic tension generated by this accidental equilibrium that smells of freedom: the works
point to the enormous range of choice we all have inside of shared social and political structures.
Strolling along the carrugio, gazing into the gallery’s expanse, the artwork takes on a two-dimensional and diffused allure. Upon entering, the color on the floor is literally flat, in contrast to the dimensionality, intricate materiality and density of the supporting structure. Touched by cohesion, linoleum molds itself in harmony with the whole: the artwork gradually becomes three-dimensional; the painting becomes sculptural and complex, graphic and auroral, though inhabitant, articulated, seeking a physical and temporal experience that rejects permanence, overturning habits and disciplinary conventions.
This perceptual fluctuation and gradual sense formation are at the core of Stockholder’s work,
a phenomenal becoming that lies at the heart of the exhibition’s concept. The artwork is in
constant dialogue with the external environment; independent yet anchored, it lies and hangs in
a liminal and dichotomous position between bidimensional vision and dialectical spatialization
with the surroundings. An untitled piece which names itself a little with every passage and every
step in this metaphorical and sensory journey.
a Scroll with Jessica
as part of her exhibition project the artist imagined a four steps metaphorical walk along Lungomare degli Artisti of Albisola
Lungomare degli Artisti, Albisola
"Animals, counting, and scale relationships between big and small all at once. ‘Animals’ are anchored to the edges of the image with vertical and horizontal lines stretching across the walkway like lines of text. These black and white, rhythmic, dancing, crawling insects – and/or mammals - waft unpredictably, reaching towards one another, full of organic activity, comforting inside of formal order."
J. Stockholder
Lungomare degli Artisti, Albisola
"Five plus five. Blue ‘holes’, or an illusion of holes float next to two stairwells: rectangular voids carved into the ground. Each ‘round’ circle, made of many triangular tiles, creates compelling ragged edges. The graphic tiles in contrast with the space of the stairwells and the three-dimensional rough bronze rounds that might be used as chairs. The unmoving bronze bodies occupy space; they are the same and different from our moving bodies. The work asks to be tended to by body and mind at once."
J. Stockholder
Neil Campbell picture from: https://officebaroque.com/neil-campbell
Lungomare degli Artisti, Albisola
"The tiles feel like pixels on a screen. Blue and black – black and blue. And white. A circle outlined; a circle filled in becoming a picture – perhaps a landscape. And then, the tiles move apart to describe a cloud or a dispersion. A void, a solid, and then air. Full and empty all at once"
J. Stockholder
Lungomare degli Artisti, Albisola
"I see in my mind’s eye a small drawing on a desktop that may have originated this field of mosaic tiles on the ground. A turn of the wrist blown up to fill the space of a few steps. I see amoebas swimming underfoot, and I imagine that I, walking on them, have shrunk to fit into the space of the picture. It’s a very big picture and I’m an ant. I think of Chagall – where the things imaged inside the picture each propose a different point of view for us, the onlookers, and the space imagined in the picture is always shifting. The orientation of the alphabet letters spelling Jorn’s name let us know that this tiled picture has a top and bottom." J. Stockholder
