Jessica Houston

What Nations Come and Go

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...

By using references to navigational coastal profiling and by borrowing and subverting compositional structures of the 19th century American landscape painters I examine how modern la...

Jenny Day is a painter who divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. She paints a fragmented space, examining human demand and the effects of environmental d...