Jessica Houston

Scramble For Maritime Territory

2017

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...

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...

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...

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...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

“I am interested in art that suggests a narrative,” says artist Chadwick Tolley. While he uses his personal experience as a point of reference for his prints, drawings, and collages,...

Composition is a black and white etching on paper, realized by the Italian artist Cesare Peverelli (Milan, 1922 - Paris, 2000) and printed in 1973 by La Nuova Foglio, a publishing house of Macerata, as the dry-stamp reports on the lower right corner. Hand-signed and numbered in pencil and in Arabic numerals on the lower margin. From an edition of 100 prints . This is an instinctive composition showing a very rapid line and recalling the Surrealist concept of automatic writing...