reviews JEssIca stocKHoLDEr
Jessica
stockholder:
sex in the office
1301PE, Los angELEs
8 sEPtEmbEr – 20 octobEr
As if to delight in an ever-growing carbon footprint, Jessica
Stockholder’s happenstance assemblages reconcile the ubiquity of
mass-produced plastics with the simple pleasure of nonfunctionality.
Loaded with all the calculation of design and the pretensions of
painting, her sculptures rely on the prefab trappings of organisation,
decoration and miscellaneous furnishings – modular shelving,
kitchenware, assorted containers, lids and armatures – to deliberately
structure formal arrangements within space. Using the surrounding
architecture like a skeleton, Stockholder’s ambitious installations are
undeniably aimed towards the viewer’s body. Yet for her first solo
show at 1301PE, the artist loosens her hold on the gallery space,
presenting, at a more intimate scale, objects that seem to want
only their own bodies. And if it’s not immediately apparent in the
symbiotic forms, the show’s title, Sex in the Office, might also hint at
this fresh proclivity.
This group of three new works and two older pieces is at times clumsy and at others tawdry.
Two Frames, 2007, mixed media,
236 x 130 x 56 cm. Photo: robert Wedemeyer.
The show’s namesake, Sex in the Office (all works 2007), might best illustrate this; affixed to the wall, a courtesy 1301PE, Los angeles
barbed construction of metal table legs protrudes through the ribbed undersurface of a clear plastic
floor mat. Hanging on one of its legs is a peachy cluster of seashells decorated with crimped strands
of yarn. In front of this form, an improvised glass coffee table serves as a kind of pedestal for an erect
shelving unit draped with a rubber car mat and crowned by more metal table legs. These relational
forms seem conscious of their unique ergonomics, the design science based on maximising an object’s
functionality in relation to its user’s physical needs. Like some biomorphic crustacean, the claws and
tendrils of the wall piece seem to invite and tempt the cumbersome freestanding object. Suspended in
a pregnant tension, the two parts fail to touch, embodying the human impulses of attraction and sexual
frustration, and the politically correct social mores of the workplace.
In contrast, Two Frames demonstrates an overt bliss that is otherwise repressed in the rest of the
show. Hung like a swing from a wall-mounted hook, the focal point of Two Frames is a hot-pink, neon-
green and orange target form encased in a wooden drawer and tarted up with bright oil paint, beads,
yarn, fur, cords and a selection of anonymous pink plastic pieces. On first impression, the work recalls
the movable parts of sex toys, matted hair, bubblegum and baby bottles. Although an abstraction, the
sculpture’s subtle connotations lend a wicked and comical addition to the new body of work. Through
such studied material choices and configurations, Stockholder’s Sex in the Office strikes a crafted
balance between Rubbermaid and readymade – that is, between the branded, off-the-shelf product
and the conceptually burdened art object. In this move, mundane and wasteful industrial products are
uplifted to sexy, perverse and altogether emotional bodies. Catherine Taft
133 artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 133 2/11/07 12:16:54
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