Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to announce the second solo exhibition in London by the US artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, following her 2013 solo shows at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK and Centre PasquArt in Biel, Switzerland, and her inclusion in Massimiliano Gioni’s 'The Encyclopedic Palace' at the 55th Venice Biennale.

Hutchins’ practice is a hybrid thing, one that restlessly evolves and engages with a multiplicity of formal vocabularies, from the absurd to the profound; the personal to the universal, in a permanent state of irony. The work is primarily made out of the ‘stuff in the room’, everyday household items: clothing, furniture, photographs, which bear the marks of time on their worn surfaces and are altered further by Hutchins’ interventions.

'M, N, OH', 2013, takes a found sofa – a reoccurring object in Hutchins’ lexicon ¬– from which she builds a towering wall of plaster, extruding upwards from its cushions. This totemic mass, both obelisk and cliff, acts as a pedestal for a ceramic vessel, which in turn weighs down her husband’s old shirt that hangs from the edge. The letters from the title appear on the work – ‘M’ is found on the ceramic and ‘N’ is formed by papier-mâché across the plaster. The presence of the male figure, in the form of the shirt, elicits the ‘oh!’. This playfulness with materials, language and tone is central to Hutchins’ work.

In 'Pink on the Inside', 2013, an armchair acts as a plinth to an anthropomorphic vessel. The slumping form, part bodily stand-in, part performance prop, is ambiguous in its role and purpose as it hunches over the upholstered surface. It adopts a human-like quality like much of Hutchins’ sculptural forms, yet refrains from being simplistically figurative; a sophisticated collision of references and associations is at play here. As with the found objects and their personal histories, the sculptural interventions also carry the history of their own production. Colin Lang notes in the publication to accompany the recent museums shows, ‘Hutchins is an archeologist; one who excavates the present.’

This exhibition also features wall-based works including, 'Erblaut', 2013. Titled following a mistranslation of the German word for ‘allowed’ (erlaubt), the painting is composed of a re-stretched canvas with various inks, paints and materials permeating the unprimed surface. Hutchins flirts with what is ‘allowed’; the boundaries between each discipline bleed into one another; sculptures become plinths, canvasses support ceramic vessels or crumple awkwardly over industrial ladders; prints are juxtaposed with found objects. These forms are resolutely abstract yet they solicit ‘reading’. Their fragility and imperfections allude to the physicality of the human body yet they remain stubbornly indefinable. There is something inescapably primal to her work; appropriately ‘erblaut’ is loosely translated to ‘hereditary noise’, a noise from pre-history – the big bang.