Jessica Jackson Hutchins: The Important Thing About A Chair

The work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins is known for its robust physicality. In her assemblage sculpture and mixed media work on paper, she brings together the recycled and the new, the bruised and the beautiful. She teases out notions of function and display by creating richly glazed vessels and locating them on top of or inside used furniture (armchairs, couches, tables), or balancing them on plinths of her own devising (papier mache and plaster). Her use of old clothing, food containers, and newspapers make reference to everyday rituals and family life, and place her in the rich tradition of artists who combine the personal and the cultural, including Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, and Louise Bourgeois.

Works produced for her exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center are influenced by religious narratives of conception, communion, and death. Fragmented figures express states of vulnerability and the need for nurturing, exemplified by urns cradled in velvet fabrics. Recent drawings and prints turn text and punctuation marks into fleshy deposits on vibrant colored papers. In Annunciation, Hutchins carved words and gestures into the top of a piano lid, and took an impression of its inked surface, later adding collage elements including a Virgin Records tee shirt and jewelry.

The artist has stated, “Transformation, evidence of work, accidents, the time contained in the humanity of the objects—all that stuff is crucial to get at what I’m trying to get at, which is ways of connecting to the world, ways of knowing ourselves through the things we encounter.” Hutchins’ cultivation of process and residue gives her work an undeniable vitality and grace.

This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Tim and Lauren Schrager Family Foundation.

Photos by Mike Jensen