The Green Gallery is excited to present Jessica Jackson Hutchins Gimme Gimme Starlight. This will be the artist's second exhibition at the gallery and sixth show in Wisconsin. Hutchins has previously exhibited at Hermetic Gallery, INOVA, John Michael Kohler Art Center and Sculpture Milwaukee. In this presentation, the artist deploys and extends her visual and material vocabulary positing a dynamic allusion to the body against something more graphic, rigid and solid. This play leaves the viewer somewhere in between; amidst knowable references and potentiality presiding within the enigmatic.
At the core of Hutchins practice is process and vulnerability lying therein. A laissez faire attitude allows for accidents and emergence to occur. A decision is intentional but the outcome is unpredictable. Every decision is an experiment that can fail. Some decisions coalesce together quickly and successfully. Others may be shelved for years, only to be made sense of later when paired with a future object. So there is history located within actions; a narrative story telling of the artist's interaction with days, people, food intake, and studio stuff. Hutchins wants the viewer to see her lack of perfection not a flex of skillful mastery. This choice draws the viewer in versus being distanced by rarification. Hutchins wants her art objects to possess potential in the world, to be affected by it; the works are actors in conversation with one another.
To read Hutchins' work is to teeter. We see the body by way of fleshy color and anthropomorphic form, but it is never quite a body. Graphic prints, found objects and occasionally language, enter the work only to be eschewed or offset. These references are recognizable and Hutchins uses them to draw us in. She immediately turns us around though, pointing, pulling, and pushing toward another visual cue. In the same way process is intentionally unresolved, so too is the reading of the work. Hutchins creates a liminal space where references to the outside are never fixed. This invites potentiality in lieu of a prescriptive reading and understanding. There is some mild absurdity within these new works. That space allows for ideas and understandings to shuffle around; to become something they were not before. Meaning hovers; but this avoids the rampant didacticism of our present.
Hutchins is not giving absolutes, she is providing discovery. These art objects remind us of fleeting moments in the present, where our visual field coalesces before being fixed. Hutchins gorgeously provides a glimpse.
Gimme Gimme Starlight opens on Friday, May 23rd for an early preview to the public. We would love for you to join us and the artist for the opening reception at the gallery on Saturday, May 24th from 4-6pm.