| Robischon: Jessica Stockholder and John McEnroe |
| Written by Ken Hamel | |||
Jessica Stockholder and John McEnroeRobischon GalleryNovember 7, 2009 – January 9, 2010
 John McEnroe at Robischon Click here for photos from the exhibit... Robischon Gallery 1740 Wazee Street Denver, CO 80202 303.298.7788 Tue-Sat: 11:00-6:00 http://www.robischongallery.com
photos by Ken Hamel/DenverArts.org
 Jessica Stockholder - Untitled (2007) Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its first showing of work by renowned installation artist Jessica Stockholder featuring the artist’s assemblage-based sculpture and new monoprints. As a highly influential pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Stockholder utilizes everyday materials such as buckets, faux fur, fake fruit and other miscellaneous mass-produced ephemera and integrates them into color-charged, eccentric three-dimensional works. Stockholder references antecedents of American abstraction while utilizing a kind of modern day cultural fabric of domestic objects and easily-obtained cheap, plastic goods and other such consumerist desires. Always formally based in her vision, by integrating the above, she sweeps viewers into a confluence of color and form, creating multi-planed experiences between the pictorial and the physical. From her celebrated large-scale installations to her self-contained sculptural works and monoprints, Stockholder’s vivid vocabulary reveals a unique dialogue between disciplines and materials. Evoking the spirit of Duchampian “readymades,” Stockholder conflates sculpture and painting in a mix of improvisational, seemingly playful materiality that becomes a visual sensibility all her own. Influential to a young generation of emerging artists, Stockholder’s diversely formal work places her in dialogue with pioneering artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Judy Pfaff. Stockholder nods to their uniquely created languages by expressing her own as she elevates found objects into pure form amidst her complex painterly installations. Stockholder has distinguished her own specific artistic ground, recognized for illuminating each element within her sculptural works as she exalts in a kind of abundant fullness in form. A quote from The Brooklyn Rail states, “Just as Lego® pieces preserve their identity no matter what the context, with Stockholder a plastic bucket always remains a plastic bucket. Yet, it's within the symphonic convergence of the sculpture that its specific surface and shape take on a broader formal significance.” Equally progressive, the dimensional “Swiss Cheese” series monoprints on view, which include elements of photography, wood engraving and other materials such as Styrofoam, originated as a tangential series to the artist’s massive-scale public art installation, Flooded Chambers Maid, in New York’s Madison Square Park in the summer of 2009. Infused with the embedded geometry of the natural world, each unique work plays on what the artist refers to as the elements of “rational and irrational geometry.” Widely recognized in her field, Jessica Stockholder continues to be, as she has over the years, a source of inspiration to countless artists and curators. The Denver Art Museum’s Christoph Heinrich, as the curator for “Embrace!” frequently shares how Stockholder was the first artist selected to anchor his ambitious and progressive installation exhibition for 2009-2010. Optical, tactile and essentially material, the artist states that her work “brings chaos to the fore and makes order where there is little or none.” Jessica Stockholder received her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria, Canada and her M.F.A. from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe with works in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the LA County Museum of Art and Saatchi & Saatchi Collection, London, among others. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions including ones in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Since 1999, Stockholder has been the Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific installation in the Denver Art Museum’s “Embrace!” exhibition goes on view November 14, 2009. As an installation participant in the Denver Art Museum exhibition entitled “Embrace!” opening Nov 14, 2009, noted Colorado artist John McEnroe is featured in a concurrent solo exhibition at Robischon Gallery featuring innovative new works of large-scale sculpture. Through melting, stretching and fusing children’s toys, play structures and other plastic objects, in this exhibition McEnroe’s large compositions shape-shift and repurpose the ever-present and largely disposable detritus of every day lives into evocative artworks. Literally playful, with a tactile quality, the work’s expansive range is both formally substantial and sophisticated. The nature of the artist’s layered process allows for meaning as McEnroe addresses compelling issues of transience and permanence while the chosen process and materials dictate the formal result. By utilizing and melting sculptural components such as a plastic outdoor playhouse or a Star Wars® mask in one series of work, while exploring a simultaneous series of sculpture made up of resin encased in nylon prosthetic stockings as featured in the artist’s upcoming “Embrace!” exhibition, McEnroe continues to push the sculptural boundaries. His commitment in the studio to discover new combinations of both process and material allow the viewer to meet the unpredictable in John McEnroe’s adventurous work. John McEnroe has a B.F.A. from Kansas University and an M.F.A. from Ohio State University. Frequently exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the Front Range, he has been awarded several high-profile public art commissions in Denver including, most notably, National Velvet at the Highlands pedestrian bridge, Model State: A Local Cosmology at the Colorado Convention Center and Fool’s Gold as part of the RTD Light Rail Station Project that incorporated art into the light rail stops throughout the Denver metro area. He has work in the Denver Art Museum’s permanent collection and was prominently featured the MCA Denver’s “Decades of Influence” exhibition.
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