Items Similar to There Remains and Irreducible Parity
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 7
Jessica HoustonThere Remains and Irreducible Parity2022
2022
About the Item
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene.
In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities.
Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed?
Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see.
In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along?
In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter?
“Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary and his African-American second in command, Mathew Henson, who was consistently erroneously referred to as Peary’s “manservant.”
Houston re-mystifies polar landscapes that have become through tourism and even the most well-meaning nature documentaries too familiar, too smooth and clean, replete with aesthetically pleasing icebergs and bright icescapes under perfect blue skies. But the poles have 6 months of darkness too. Houston deepens and complicates received images, but without reviving heroic dramas of survival against a blank, enemy ice. The ice in the “Sur” paintings is grimy, oily, swirling with evocations of masted ships swallowed up in dark seas. History is a risk. Survival is not guaranteed.
- Creator:Jessica Houston (1970, American)
- Creation Year:2022
- Dimensions:Height: 9 in (22.86 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Montreal, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU47610876142
Jessica Houston
Jessica Houston (MA, Columbia University) has traveled from pole to pole, using color and light to entangle and provoke questions related to our changing natural world, and our nature within it. She has created site-specific works for the NJ MOCA (NJ); the Castello di Corigliano (Puglia, Italy); and The Albany Airport (Albany, NY). Select exhibitions include Art Mûr Gallery, Montréal, Canada; The Hyde Collection Museum, Glens Falls, NY; and The Latimer House Museum, New York, NY. She has been invited to residencies at The Albers Foundation and CAMAC Center for Art, Science and Technology in France. Her works are funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and are in the collections of La collection Prêt d’œuvres d’art, Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Quebec; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), Montréal, Québec; Bank of Montréal, Toronto; and the Consulate General of Monaco, Montréal. She has lectured at The Art Institute of Florence; Columbia University; Concordia University; and OCAD University.
About the Seller
5.0
Vetted Seller
These experienced sellers undergo a comprehensive evaluation by our team of in-house experts.
Established in 1996
1stDibs seller since 2014
96 sales on 1stDibs
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: Montreal, Canada
- Return PolicyA return for this item may be initiated within 7 days of delivery.
More From This SellerView All
- we came in sight of the Barrier...By Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, QuebecA group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- But then, the backside...By Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, Quebec“But then, the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that …But the achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- Holding Up and Attracting the EarthBy Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, QuebecA group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- Action Which Enables Us to Project Our Forces Into the Outside WorldBy Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, QuebecA group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- We were sledgehaulersBy Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, QuebecA group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- The little YelchoBy Jessica HoustonLocated in Montreal, QuebecA group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
You May Also Like
- Life's A GasLocated in Santa Monica, CAAerosol, acrylic, oil, charcoal, pastel, tile, polyfil, yarn, marble, bouncy balls, half marbles, e6000, grout, on a wood panelCategory
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsCharcoal, Pastel, Oil, Acrylic, Wood Panel
- Scissors Yankel Contemporary painting arbstract art collage red blue blackBy Jacques YankelLocated in Paris, FROil paint and collage on wood panel Unique work Hand-signed lower right by the artistCategory
1990s Contemporary Abstract Paintings
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel
- "Celadon 3"- Soft Subtle Pastels, Fine Art Abstract PaintingLocated in Brooklyn, NYLoy Luo is a Chinese artist based in New York. She received a Master's Degree from the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology in 2010 and taught art at the Beijing Institute of Science and Technology Management from 2010 to 2012. Though Luo's main focus has been painting and sculpting, she is also a conceptual and performance artist...Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
MaterialsMixed Media, Oil, Wood Panel
- The River Swept Away All Traces (Textured Encaustic Landscape Painting, Framed)By Regina QuinnLocated in Hudson, NYContemporary Impressionist Encaustic Landscape Painting "The River Swept Away All Traces", made by Regina Quinn in 2022 Made with encaustic, oil, and India Ink over watercolor on wo...Category
2010s Contemporary Landscape Paintings
MaterialsEncaustic, Oil, Wood Panel
- Cosmas and Damian - Painting by Salvatore Travascio - 2012Located in Roma, ITCosmas and Damian is an original painting realized by the Italian artist Salvatore Travascio in 2012. This beautiful artwork is a diptych in oil pai...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Paintings
MaterialsPaper, Oil, Acrylic, Wood Panel
- "Point of Departure 3", abstract, bold, orange, reds, greens, mixed mediaBy Leslie ZelamskyLocated in Natick, MALeslie Zelamsky's "Point of Departure 3" is a 65.5 x 44 x 2.75 inch mixed-media painting on wood panel. The surface of this bold abstract piece contains two large areas of orange pai...Category
2010s Contemporary Abstract Paintings
MaterialsOil, Wood Panel, Pastel, Mixed Media