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Jessica HoustonHeart World2022
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: LU47610875942
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.
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By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
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Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
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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...
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AWARDS and RESIDENCIES
2019 Individual Artist Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco CA
2017 Creative Research Grant/Artist-in-Residence, Jiwar Creació i Societat, Barcelona, Spain
2014 Development Grant, Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco CA
2013 Individual Artist Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco CA
2012 Artist-In-Residence, Can Serrat, El Bruc, Spain
2010 Artist-in-Residence, Red Cinder Creativity Center, Na’alehu, Hawaii
2008 Artspan Selections (Juried), LIMN Gallery, San Francisco CA
2007 Studio Grant/Artist-in-Residence, Red Ink Studios, San Francisco CA (2 years)
2007 Cultural Exchange Invitational, Le Genie de la Bastille, Paris, France
1999 Emerging Artist Award, 42nd
San Diego Art Institute, San Diego CA
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS and PROJECTS
2019 Infinite Sketch Installation, Brooklyn Art Library, Brooklyn, New York
The Happiness Project Interactive Installation, Oakland Murmur, CA
Love is Thicker, site specific installation, TBA
2018 Poetics of Light, Avenue 12 Gallery, San Francisco, CA (with Truong Tran)
Exhibition Gràcia Plaça de la Vila, Barcelona Spain (with Elfi Gulen & Isador Fernandez)
Urban Mobility Archive Project/Color of Belonging, Barcelona, Spain (with Jiwar)
2017 Stanford Urban Resilience Lab Collaboration, ELL Gallery & Stanford University
Animate Objects, Curated State Pop-Up Exhibition, San Francisco, CA
Familiar Distance, 123 Bolinas, Fairfax, CA (solo)
Art for AIDS, Metreon, San Francisco CA
2016 Altered BooksMarks, Adobe Backroom Gallery, San Francisco, CA (co-curator)
Daylighted Projections Exhibition, Phoenix Hotel, San Francisco CA
Levi’s Vintage Textile Workshop, Monterey CA (assisting Sherri Wood)
Aesthetics and the Night Sky, San Juan Bautista, California
The Essence Library, San Francisco Art Institute ACE, San Francisco, CA
2015 Form + Substance, Curated State, San Francisco, CA
Under the Moon, Avenue Gallery, San Francisco, CA (with Michelle Brandemuehl)
2014 After Dark, SOMArts Ramp Gallery, San Francisco, CA (solo/installation)
2013 The Telephone Project, Brooklyn NY/global (with Satellite Collective)
2012 The Lost and Found Project, Can Serrat AIR, El Bruc Spain
Eyes Closed, Can Serrat International Art & Music Festival, El Bruc Spain
Here/Now Auction, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Oakland, CA
2011 Can’t Trace Time, Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco, CA (with Andrzej Karwacki)
Live Paintings, Red Poppy Art House, San Francisco, CA (with Adrian Arias)
The Magic Hour Installation, Columbia Collaboration Lab, New York NY
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