Justine Kurland & Jessica Jackson Hutchins | Killer Maker | Viewing Room
Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents Killer Maker, a conversation with art objects between Justine Kurland and Jessica Jackson Hutchins.
Justine Kurland, Wild Palms, 2005/2022, inkjet print, 24 x 30" image, 25 x 31" framed, Edition of 4, 2AP
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Killer maker.
The two words taken together can suggest many things: the harsh reality of life’s cycle, a cosmic balancing act, an impossible binary that circles back in on itself. The simultaneously adversarial and harmonious nature is where Hutchins’ assemblages of ceramics, furniture, papier-mâché, and paint and Kurland’s photographs staged in the American West converge. Both artists refuse motherhood’s embrace (Hutchins has described it as “un-knowing” and Kurland as “abdication”): of authority, of resolution, of fixity.
LEFT:
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Self-Portrait as an Antiquity, 2006
papier mache and jewelry display rack
60 x 15 x 18"
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Installation view of the exhibition Killer Maker.
Hutchins’ small gouaches (right), explorations of the shape of color, show figures enmeshed in the landscape, undulations of pigment that recline on, drape from, and melt into their surroundings.
Justine Kurland, Of Woman Born (2004-2007/2022) series
inkjet prints, 24 x 30" image each, 25 x 31" framed each, Editions of 4, 2AP each
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Jessica Jackson Hutchins, gouache works on paper (2023)
15.5 x 15.75" paper each, 19 x 19" framed each
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In Kurland’s photographic series Of Woman Born (2004–2007) (left), groups of nude women, pregnant and with young children, dot the vast landscape—they appear nestled in a towering rock formation, bathing at the base of a waterfall, or converging in a clearing in the woods, dappled with sunlight.
The title Of Woman Born is borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 feminist text and aligns Kurland with Rich’s mission to untangle the construct of motherhood. Nearly twenty years after they were made, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade’s protections casts the questions posed by these photographs into sharper light.
Without reproductive freedom, is there any such thing as motherhood? Would we still be raping, pillaging, and extracting natural resources if we considered the earth a father instead of a mother? Or would the earth be revered the way the heavenly father is?
Read Justine Kurland’s artist statement for the photographic series, Of Woman Born.
Justine Kurland, Ruby Beach Sea Stack, Double Mother, 2006/2022, inkjet print, 24 x 30" image, 25 x 31" framed, Edition of 4, 2AP
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In Hutchins' wall reliefs organic but amorphous forms resonate with the pregnant and recently pregnant bodies in Kurland’s photographs. In a direct quote of the work and a nod to their two-decade friendship, Hutchins lovingly collages fragments of Kurland’s photographs into the pulped paper growths.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, A Number of the Living, 2023, gouache, collage, water color with paper mache on paper, 15.75 x 18.5 x 1.5"
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Detail image of A Number of the Living, 2023 by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, incorporating images by Justine Kurland.
Justine Kurland, Wahclella Falls, 2006/2022, inkjet print, 24 x 30" image, 25 x 31" framed , Edition of 4, 2AP, INQUIRE>
Installation view of the exhibition, Killer Maker.
Her polyvalent assemblages of paint, ceramic, and papier-mâché—accumulated onto paper or combined with upholstered and wooden furniture—are scrappy, raw, and sensuous in their intuited handmade construction. They resist an all-over, cohesive understanding, instead offering discordant unions that mine the meaning in the objects we live with. In one sculpture an armchair becomes a body, its soft flesh taking shelter under a papier-mâché shell, itself topped with a splayed-open peel of ceramic.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Grünewald, 2023, glazed ceramic, plaster on found chair, 70 x 41 x 47"
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Justine Kurland, Self Portrait with Casper, Texas Canyon, 2006/2022, inkjet print, 24 x 30" image, 25 x 31" framed, Edition of 4, 2AP
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Jessica Jackson Hutchins, A thousand Chapters, 2022, needlepoint on canvas , 8.75 x 15", 11.75 x 18.5" framed
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JUSTINE KURLAND
Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts, NY in 1996, and her MFA from Yale University in 1998. Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. Museum exhibitions have included Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2009) and Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (2009). Kurland was also the focus of a solo exhibition at CEPA in Buffalo, NY (2009). Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the ICP, New York; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal.
View works from Kurland’s 2010 solo exhibition This Train is Bound for Glory
JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’s expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’s works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.