We are delighted to announce Jessica Jackson Hutchins' inclusion in the 55th Venice Biennale.
Hutchins combines elements both bruised and beautiful in strangely evocative and robust assemblage sculptures. Familiar materials refer to everyday rituals (eating, reading, sex) but abstracted, the banal suggests transcendence.
At the center of Hutchins' practice is a deliberate defiance of overt signification and a rigorous commitment to either silence or, paradoxically, strident polyvalence. The work resists "content" per se, and this resistance is understood as a poetic resistance with political implications. Moreover, the uncomfortable persistence of the personal in Hutchins' work underscores her politics, where empathy and humanism are part of a refusal to participate in the strategic production and commodification of ideological and formal content. Sometimes this refusal occurs in the obscenity of materials and form of the work, or in an absurd confluence of signification — such as the combination of sentimental furniture from childhood with a contemporary political situation or in using an embarrassing family snapshot on an abstract collage. The refusal in this case is an ironic absurdity: the absurdity of trying to make art personal; the absurdity to affect that it is anything but personal; and the absurd and hopeful gesture that it is able to do more than just bridge the distances, and instead shove us all together.
UPCOMING SOLO EXHIBITIONS
The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK
through May 12, 2013
Art Basel | Statements, Basel, CH
June 13–16, 2013
CentrePasquArt, Kunsthaus, Biel, CH
June 30–September 1, 2013
Laurel Gitlen
122 Norfolk Street
New York, NY 10002
p 212.274.0761
f 212.274.0756
http://www.laurelgitlen.com
gallery@laurelgitlen.com
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