Jessica Houston

They Surveyed the Mountain Peak as a Philosophical

2022

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...

Going North in the Work of Jessica Houston By L. Sasha Gora Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper...

Collage of photographs and Pantone color swatches on paper Suspended in a Sunbeam, is a series of mixed-media works that span Jessica Houston’s decade-long engagement with the Canad...

Going North in the Work of Jessica Houston By L. Sasha Gora Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? He...

Mountain High

Marcos Acosta's paintings beckon and beguile. His most recent collection of Colorado and Southwestern landscapes --paintings on canvas as well as works on paper -- are furtive medita...

Small mountains on dark paper. Gouache and graphite on handmade paper.

Abstracted landscape by Calee Dunlap (American, b. 1988). A ridge of mountains are rendered in a topographic style, with layers of paint and marker. Atop the mountain there is a tran...