Jessica Houston Mixed Media
American, b. 1970
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.to
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Artist: Jessica Houston
But then, the backside...
By Jessica Houston
Located 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 Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Mine At Last
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
The Long Haul
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Photographic Paper
Launching Strategy
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Captain Cook’s Legacy
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Polar Opposites and Complementary Relationship
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Heart World
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
They Surveyed the Mountain Peak as a Philosophical
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
The Forward March Loses Ground
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Footprints
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Ink, Archival Paper
Around Us and Within Us
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Into Mystery Land
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
The nine of us worked things out...
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Territory Over Land
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
No Such Border
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
The steam from our own small funnel
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
The little Yelcho
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Exposed as our camp...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Exposed as our camp was to every wind, we built no rigid structures above ground. We set up tents to shelter in while we dug a series of cubicles in the ice itself.”
Over the Edge ...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
The Shadow Economy of Extraction
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Geological Markers
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Architecture of the Anthropocene
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Which we are part
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
We are part of that nature we see to understand
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
A Balancing Land
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
There Remains and Irreducible Parity
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 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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Holding Up and Attracting the Earth
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Inextricably Linked
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Action Which Enables Us to Project Our Forces Into the Outside World
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Between Them
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
If the Two Realities Are Thus Brought Together
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
The Impossible Abyss Which Separates the Two Sides
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Of a Difference in Which the Differences Are Inseparable
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Both Above and Below
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Compass Rose
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
To Hang In Between
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Taking Place
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 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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Ink, Archival Paper
The Sky Was A Doorway
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Drawing in Water
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 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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Ink, Archival Paper
The Fatigue of the Conquest
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 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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Ink, Archival Paper
Of the return voyage...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Of the return voyage there is nothing to tell… In 1912 all the world learned that the brave Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole; and then, much l...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
We were sledgehaulers
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
She dug out one more cell...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“She dug out one more cell just under the ice surface, leaving nearly a transparent sheet of ice like a greenhouse roof; and there, alone, she worked at sculptures...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
Eight Adélie Penguins...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Eight Adélie Penguins immediately came to greet us … They insisted on us going to visit Hut Point, where the large structure built by Captain Scott’s pa...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
instead of a narrow bight...
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
we came in sight of the Barrier...
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
…last Thule of the South
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
"…last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, suppositious islands, headlan...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
When I was little more...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“When I was little more than a child my imagination was caught by a newspaper account of the voyage of the Belgica…”
Over the Edge of the World locates itself in the entangled lega...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
A summary report...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“A SUMMARY REPORT OF THE YELCHO EXPEDITION TO THE ANTARCTIC, 1909-1910. Although I have no intention of publishing this report, I think it would be nice if a grandchild of mine, or somebody’s grandchild, happened to find it some day; so I shall keep it in the leather trunk in the attic, along with Rosita’s christening dress and Juanito’s silver rattle and my wedding shoes...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Oil, Wood Panel
The Second Flight
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Aerial Exploration
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Undercurrents
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
The Plume of Nationalism
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Henson and Peary - Past Entanglements
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Ghost in the Land
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Archival Paper, Magazine Paper
Word World
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
Looking forward
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
Basic needs
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Jessica Houston Mixed Media
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
Jessica Houston mixed media for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Jessica Houston mixed media available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of mixed media to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue, purple, orange and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by Jessica Houston in oil paint, paint, panel and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 21st century and contemporary and is mostly associated with the contemporary style. Not every interior allows for large Jessica Houston mixed media, so small editions measuring 9 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Mark Jackson, Ana Seggiaro, and Kat Flyn. Jessica Houston mixed media prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1,100 and tops out at $3,200, while the average work can sell for $1,400.
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