LOS ANGELES—Portland-based artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ dynamic sculptural installations of household objects, collages, paintings and large-scale ceramics are featured in the two-person exhibition Secret Sister at The Pit (January 17 – February 18, 2018) alongside the works of painter Rebecca Morris.
Exhibition view
Secret Sister is the first exhibition for pair of lifelong friends and colleagues, who share similar aesthetics, world views, and unwavering commitments to their artistic practices, the gallery writes.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ work in sculpture pairs ceramic vessels with found furniture to create provocative tableaux that challenge received ideas of craft, domesticity, and conventional beauty. Her recent work in glass extends her exploration of materials more readily associated with artisanal fields than the arena of fine art and moves deeper into abstraction, using color and light as well as scale to create assertive yet graceful and uncanny forms.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Writing not Writing, 2017, fused glass, ceramic, steel, 60 x 28 x 16 inches.
Alternate view
Alongside and in contrast to Hutchins’ work, is that of Morris, whose paintings offer up constellations of gestures that are at once familiar and strange, the gallery writes.
Her paintings are a deep investment and reflection in the medium’s elemental concerns regarding shape, color, and gesture. Morris’ compositions play with spatial hierarchies – margins, borders, the center in contrast to the edges, and so forth. Contrast itself is a foregrounding concept within her paintings and in this context creates a field for contemplation or reflection when viewed with Hutchins’ sculptures.
Exhibition view
Secret Sister, which is an ArtForum critic’s pick, represents a moment of pause amid a long and esteem-filled association between the two artists; their collaboration is a physical manifestation of that dialogue.
You can read an interview with the artists here.
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