The catalogue Jessica Stockholder was published in conjunction with the exhibition Saint Clair Cemin & Jessica Stockholder that took place in Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (15 June 1991 – 28 July 1991), and in The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1 October 1991 – 10 November 1991)
Stockholder’s assemblages pay homage to the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art, while, in her oeuvre manifold paths intertwine with one another, expressing possibilities for art beyond the simplistic clichés of appropriation and the collage of cynicism and parody. Her work presents an opportunity to come to terms with our individual and collective ephemerality and death, while it is in no way dogmatic, and therein lays its appeal. Rather, through a complexity of material, Stockholder’s work generates innovation and associations, and new, various possibilities of understanding, allowing a multiplicity of possible perspectives, and suggesting different ways of thinking. This is indeed very comforting, as it is difficult to make sense of the pluralistic cultural world we inhabit today from only one fixed point of view. Stockholder has investigated the probabilities of art, contriving to discover new ways of proposing the humanistic concept of difference and heterogeneity.
In the catalogue, Stockholder’s heterogeneous, nomadic acts and thoughts are retraced for the first time. The aim of this publication has been to link documentation of Stockholder’s installations from the 1980’s to John Miller’s thoughtful re-thinking and reformulation of the force of assemblage. Since the beginning of this collaboration, the exhibition and the catalogue had been conceived as two separate projects, that wouldn’t have been realized without Stockholder’s strong response to both.