At her home in New Haven, Jessica Stockholder discusses the inspiration for "Vortex in the Play of Theater with Real Passion: In Memory of Kay Stockholder" (2000) at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland. A temporary site-specific installation, the materials for the project include Duplo, work site construction containers, and elements from a theatrical stage.
A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as "paintings in space." Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.
This is one of my favorite pieces. I mean it’s hard to say what’s a favorite piece generally, but I really love this piece.
This is all Duplo, which is a bigger form of Lego. And Legos on two coffee tables that are cut to be lower and sort of spliced together.
So they're kind of like a pedestal or base for this Lego thing. And these are containers, for construction sites, like to make a little room outside.
And these are aerated concrete blocks that are building material for houses. And this is a bench with a theater light that points at the wall
and the theatre curtain.
Here I was thinking a lot about scale. So, they're all different kinds of building blocks. And the play of putting these together sits next to the work of putting these together
and you know questions about what are work and what are play kind of meander around.
The title came after I made the work: "Vortex in the Play of Theater with Real Passion: In Memory of Kay Stockholder."
My mother, she was a very theatrical person. This piece wasn’t made to illustrate my mother or be a portrait of her,
but in retrospect, you know, the theater of the piece was interesting in relationship to her, for me. And I am also interested in theatre
in art and how sculpture has become kind of theatrical. You know, having taken it off the pedestal, which separated it from the space of the room,
it now sits in the room with you and you move in the same space as it. So you become an actor in the room kind of alongside the actor
that the sculpture is. And this piece is kind of exploring that. So it’s kind of the self-conscious highlighting of that sort of expression.
People are expressive. Art's expressive, but it’s not that fact that’s so important. It’s rather what we make of all of that expression.
Post new comment