Jessica Stockholder: Coating

Coating is the title of a series of digital photographs made by Jessica Stockholder between 2006 and 2008, a selection of which was first shown in the exhibition Lumps Bumps & Windy Figures Too at the Art & Essai gallery of the University of Rennes 2 in 2008, curated by Mari Linnman.

"Better known is Jessica Stockholder's work that is both pictorial and spatial, offering an infinite exploration of viewpoints to viewers moving around and through her installations. Here, it is the artist who has covered with her gaze objects, fragments of works, things and others, located in a given space, to offer an image materially made of a thin layer.

Coating titles both the series of photographs and a book that allowed the artist to show the images in a hybrid way, mixing photographs and color patches with the presence of words. When the images are presented in pairs, the artist plays with their format and arrangement, others are shown opposite the image of a color that, in a degraded way, fades into the white of the glossy paper. The use of words is sporadic and enigmatic, it participates in the image, in its reading, but also in its blurring.

The Coating series shows us that Jessica Stockholder's work is not only a way of seeing but also a tool of perception, even a critical tool. Her use of photography - a 'conventional' medium - helps us to understand that this work not only invites us to look, but also proposes a way of doing so - a way of looking at the concrete things and the abstract structures of the world from which the images emerge."

Mari Linnman
2009