Jessica Stockholder lecture

A few weeks ago, October 24th to be exact, I travelled to Halifax to attend a lecture by installation artist Jessica Stockholder. Since I live a few hours away, and I don't drive, this meant I had to take a shuttle bus, stay overnight in a B & B, and, of course, shop and gallery hop in the time I had left over. The fact that I got hopelessly lost wandering around the city (I finally found someone who said - "Go that way") meant that I visited only one gallery, but I did manage to cram a lot of shopping into the next morning.

The Stockholder lecture was announced on the NSCAD news page and briefly in the local newspaper, but I haven't been able to find any other news coverage of the event. I'm more than a little miffed at that because the lecture hall was packed, and she is an important artist. Her art is probably not everyone's cup of tea, since she uses everyday objects in her sculptures and sometimes the meaning behind the work can be obscure.

I have wondered if she is poking fun at 'serious art' with her sculpture but I felt from what she said in the lecture that Stockholder takes her own work very seriously. She had a very good slideshow to go with her talk, although I would have liked it if she had shown a bit more of her recent work. And she had some really good slides of my favourite piece, which I can't find anywhere on the internet, of a wall of car bodies, and the surrounding landscape which she created.

I actually have some of Stockholder's works, sort of. A few years ago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago had a fundraising sale and I bought a package of Stockholder's contribution - a hundred paper placemats, which are photos of kitchen gadgets/containers sitting on placemats. In fact, the placemats are on sale again for Christmas this year. [corrections and site added November 16/08] One of these days, I'm going to do my own gadget/placemat photo.

There is a very good site for this artist on PBS's Art:21 website. There she describes her approach to her work. The YouTube video below is from this series.



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