Jessica Stockholder: a merging of mediums: since the 1980s, Stockholder has used everyday items and liberally applied paint to create distinctive sculpture-painting hybrids. A traveling survey of her sculptures goes on view this month at the Weatherspoon Art Museum

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Frances Colpitt

The concept of sculpture has changed so much in recent decades that most of what is currently classified as sculpture bears little resemblance to the millennia-old tradition of carved or cast figures. Practically any three-dimensional object serving a decorative, esthetic or conceptual purpose is now viewed as sculpture. The shift occurred in the 1960s, when Donald Judd argued that his planar wooden forms were not sculptures since they were neither "sculpted" nor statues. Sculpture, he proclaimed in 1965, "is finished." In the late '60s, Earth artist Michael Heizer declared that "the idea of sculpture has been destroyed, subverted, put down." But sculpture, like painting, refused to die; instead, it was redefined to include the works of the very artists who rejected it.

Two major exhibitions of Jessica Stockholder's work have recently provided the opportunity to consider these issues. A new installation, Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam, was created for the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, while "Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works, 1988-2003" surveys Stockholder's portable sculptures, which she calls "studio works." The latter show debuted at the Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston, and opens this month at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, N.C. Together, the two shows offered in-depth access to this prolific midcareer artist's production, which reveals surprisingly little change over the course of 16 years. Throughout, she has maintained a consistent level of energy and formal complexity.

Born in Seattle in 1959, Stockholder grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied in the 1970s with sculptor Mowry Baden, whose architectural constructions from that period suggest bridges or passageways and other spaces through which the spectator moves. Baden's commitment to physically involve the viewer in articulated arrangements of materials in space had a lasting influence on Stockholder. Originally a painter, she progressed from unstretched canvases to painted reliefs of cloth, wood and other materials before making her first large-scale installation in 1983. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1985 and lived in Brooklyn from 1985 until 1999. She is currently director of graduate studies in sculpture at Yale.

Organized by Nancy Doll and Terrie Sultan, "Kissing the Wall" includes 22 small and medium-size sculptures and five monoprints. The exhibition's title derives from Kissing the Wall #2 (1988), which incorporates a closed tripod projector screen that serves as the vertical support for a bulbous wad of newspapers sealed in plaster, partially painted with orange, green and magenta oil and acrylic. One leg of the screen touches the wall on which there is a small light fixture with a glowing fluorescent tube covered with a transparent purple sleeve.

The wall is a significant component in Stockholder's work. The freestanding pieces, begun five years after she developed her spacious installations, utilize it to support pictorial elements such as mirrors or painted and assembled backdrops. Many works are connected to the wall by wires or electrical cords, which generate an invisible but dynamic source of energy in her work. Like color, which Stockholder uses liberally, the wall is typically an issue for painting rather than sculpture. Merging the two mediums, all the works in the exhibition, except one, were related to the wall in some fashion.

Stockholder's works consistently encourage movement around them and entice the spectator to peer behind them. Such curiosity is particularly rewarded by a 1990 sculpture (most studio works are identified only by the year of their creation rather than a title), the front of which is formed by a 5-foot-high rectangular wooden frame resembling stretcher bars with a slanted top. Supported by the frame, a blue panel bears a circular light failure with one red and one white bulb. Concealed by the front of the sculpture, which stands a foot or so away from the wall, is a string of crocheted flowers that dangles from one side of the sculpture's back and is reflected in a square mirror mounted on the wall. Discovery of the mirror and yarn leads the viewer to another delightful surprise between the wall and the geometric face of the sculpture: a large, free-form concave disk made of papier-mache and painted red like a big poppy.

In Kissing the Wall #5 with Yellow (1990) a metal chair, covered with painted-over spools of thread and wool, and glued-on newspapers, conceals a lightbulb mounted on a wooden panel behind it. The bulb illuminates a yellow rectangle of paper taped to the wall behind the chair. Because important aspects of each work are unavailable from a frontal vantage point, Stockholder's sculptures are in no way pictorial; they don't offer three-dimensionality compressed into a picture when seen from a single, static point of view. It does make sense, however, to describe her colorful, space-consuming sculptures as painterly. Mark di Suvero's early comment that his "sculpture is painting in three dimensions" is echoed in Stockholder's remark, quoted in the exhibition catalogue: "I didn't stop making paintings and start making sculpture. I still make paintings, only they are also sculpture."