The Subject as Object, or the Object as Subject

A curving, yellow brick road of shag carpeting starts at the door of Sewall Hall and seemingly runs through the plate glass window into the Rice Art Gallery.

Jessica Stockholder’s objects are drafted into service for their forms rather than for their associations. Walking into her installation is like entering into a three-dimensional painting.

A swath of red shag parallels it and looks exactly like the carpet in my Raggedy Ann-themed girlhood bedroom. But those sorts of personal associations happen with Jessica Stockholder’s work—they’re a side effect of the broad range of objects she uses in her art. Stockholder takes junk, both old and new, and incorporates it into her installations and sculptures. A circa-1960 bowling ball, a new plastic ice chest, an ancient dumbbell, a cheap discount store torchiere lamp, a vintage Royal typewriter, and a whole lot of other stuff star in Stockholder’s Rice Gallery installation, “Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam.”

Stockholder has an egalitarian attitude toward objects—she’ll use anything. Some of the objects in the exhibit, like the rusty dumbbell and bulky archaic typewriter, have a patina of age, but others, like a floor lamp with faux brass accents, look like they were just picked up from Wal-Mart.

The typewriter, dumbbell, and bowling ball are tethered by a steel cable to the header of a hastily framed-out wall of 2x4 studs; you aren’t quite sure whether they are anchoring the wall or being suspended from it. Part of the wall is sheathed with pale green water-resistant wallboard, and the arcs and necks of a series of floor lamps pass through its surfaces. Many look like they were just gathered from a garage sale—or maybe heavy-trash day, which seems to be the provenance of a worn desk, a defunct hot water heater, and an elderly club chair. They’re turned on their sides and built into the wall, as if a hasty contractor was too busy to move them out of the way.

Meanwhile, in the center of the room, a series of sandwiched slabs of Styrofoam seems to precariously balance on spindly wooden legs. More sections of wood extend from the top and wedge the blocks between the floor and ceiling. On the right side of the gallery, a jungle of yellow and white extension cords grows out of the ceiling’s light receptacles. They trail down and pool on the floor, each terminating in a single bulb resting on—are you still with me?—a bed of chicken wire set atop a brigade of wheeled safety-orange coolers. The cluster of lightbulbs looks like a school of fish—or maybe an armada of spermatozoa—heading for a big white 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque monolith—er, sorry, chest freezer.

The clean-lined rectangular freezer has the pristine minimalist look of a Donald Judd sculpture, but who knows—it could be full of deer meat. It rests on a plinth made from six immaculate white plastic ice chests. On the floor, a thick pentagonal pool of thalo-green paint is poured and frozen on the yellow shag. Still more color radiates from the wall behind—a skewed quadrilateral of pale blue covers most of it. A massive rectangle of purple paint in a Barney the Dinosaur hue is roughly rolled on top of the blue and accented with hasty smear of bubble-gum pink.

In spite of the disparate selection of objects used in the environment, Stockholder’s work really revolves around formal issues. Her objects are drafted into service for their forms rather than for their associations. Walking into Stockholder’s installation is like entering into a three-dimensional painting. Her objects function as formal elements: chairs, extension cords, seagreen Sheetrock, and shag carpeting provide shape, line, color, and texture. These appropriated real-world elements replace painted illusions.

One of Stockholder’s greatest strengths is her ability to activate the entire gallery space from floor to ceiling. A lot of installation art makes a half-hearted attempt at being site specific, but Stockholder’s installation truly is dependent on its environment—creating it somewhere else would change it entirely.

There is no slight of hand in Stockholder’s work—the construction is blunt and matter of fact. What’s going on is clear for all to see, but what it’s about is open to a range of interpretations.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer