Jessica Jackson Hutchins, “Wrecked and Righteous”

By Matthew Kangas

March 9, 2024

Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

For her West Coast museum debut, Portland-based multi-media artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins assembles an enormous number of works made of clay, glass, papier mâché, plastic, fabric and other materials. Titled “Wrecked and Righteous,” the twenty-year survey easily could have been titled “Smashed and Moshed,” reflecting the artist’s pile-on technique of layering, juxtaposing, jamming, and shoving together the myriad elements integrated into each piece.

Installation view of Jessica Jackson Hutchins, “Wrecked and Righteous,” Frye Art Museum, Seattle, January 27–May 5, 2024. Photo: Jueqian Fang

Mixing subject matter and genres as well, Hutchins employs figurative surrogates, still lifes, disused furniture, “relief paintings,” needlepoint, vases and vessels. How can one artist take so many bizarre and wayward approaches to such a huge array of materials? As Walt Whitman asked and answered, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large. I contain multitudes.)” Hutchins’ sensibility is expansive and nonjudgmental in this non-hierarchical manner: paintings are no more privileged than pots; junk store sofas are no less respected than pedestal sculptures; craft, in practice, is equal to art, all wrapped up in the artist’s overflowing imagination.

 Jessica Jackson Hutchins. “Wishlist,” 2015, sofa, mixed-media collage, resin, plaster, glazed ceramic. Sofa: 28 x 92 x 36”.; wall: 61 x 85 x 9”. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jueqian Fang 

Sometimes things get a bit hairy and hard to take. There are nearly 80 works on view, with the majority abstract ceramic or pulped paper sculptures mounted on shelves or low plinths. Worlds within worlds, one exhibit alone could have handled this side of Hutchins’ aesthetic. Nevertheless, they provide a starting point for examining the artist’s evolving aesthetic begun at graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago — small, stacked try-outs of slabs, shapes, and glazes other artists had already perfected. Wall-mounted, found cardboard cut-up collages shout out to Robert Rauschenberg (“Wounds of Compassion,” 2006); paper-pulp-bound beer bottles reference Jasper Johns (“Brooklyn Bottles,” 2000). Among the pottery, old and new, California giants like Peter Voulkos (“Love As It Is,” 2021) and Ken Price (“A Ramble,” 2008; “Star Topper,” 1999) greet us beside New York ceramists such as Kathy Butterly (“Hot Mustard Tears,” 2021) and Michael Lucero (“Mountain Tears,” 2014).

A low plinth contains the best of the ceramic undertakings, where the artist brings a more individual style to the medium. Mostly vertical, built-up stacks from ten to 50 inches high mix cast glass in some cases (“Jaywalker,” 2022) and use glaze as a drenching surface covering over ambiguous but appealing conglomerations of clay slabs pushed together (“Blue-green Landscape,” 2014). I respond to these tighter-focus unitary works more than to some of the whole-kitchen-sink assemblage sculptures.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Left: “Lascaux Reprise,” 2012/2018, glazed ceramic, upholstered chair, leather, fabric. 45 x 40 x 59”. Courtesy of the artist and Adams and Ollman, Portland. “Third Eye,” 2015, acrylic paint, collage, fabric, ceramic, chair. 56 x 47 1/2 x 6”. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jueqian Fang

To be fair, the kitchen sink is the only thing missing in that grouping. Impressively all over the place, smashed worn-out sofas support teetering ceramic walls to great drama and peril, as in “Whilst” (2015). This angle is repeated to great whimsical effect in “Wild Core” (2019, with its upside-down midcentury-modern Fiberglas chair), “The Star” (2020, whose upholstered armchair fabric cruelly parodies Arts and Crafts wallpaper by William Morris), as well as in the defiantly downbeat “Lascaux Reprise” (2012/2018) with its front chair legs amputated. Some frightening snakes of leather and clay slither over its wing back, giving it great expressionistic power, simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Two other works, “Rope Stanza” (2013) and “Berliner Haus” (2012) pay homage to the late African-American abstract artist Sam Gilliam, who draped painted fabrics over concealed free-standing struts to great dramatic and colorful effect. In Hutchins’ hands, a ladder supports darker cloths, with ominous and threatening implications, all seemingly on the verge of collapse.

Rauschenberg and Johns are once again cited in the wall-relief paintings with attached folding chairs (“Third Eye” and “Seascape,” both 2015). These and others (“Milagro 1 Blue Arm,” 2020) are imbued with bland beige, blue and pink colors that present an unwelcome recessive appearance less chromatically appealing than the framed needlepoint weavings (“Albion Rose,” “A Thousand Chapters” both 2022).

 Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Left: “Rope Stanza,” 2013, ladder, canvas, acrylic paint, glazed ceramic, macramé hanger, 79 1/2 x 102 1/2 x 59”. Courtesy of the Miller Meigs Collection. “Berliner Haus,” 2012, ladder, canvas, pastel, acrylic paint, photocopies, glazed ceramick 88 2/3 x 78 7/8 x 82 2/3”. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jueqian Fang

Hutchins has so many Americana themes going — building, sewing, lounging, eating, trashing — that it’s hard to keep track of where and how she has traveled. But the show’s curator, Amanda Donnan, deliberately avoided any chronological layout. Instead, she substituted endless artist’s statements hovering on the wall, all the better to allow the artist in effect to review her own exhibit: “rather powerful;” “They relate to motherhood ... where your body is the food ... It wasn’t consciously in my mind, but you can’t argue with it;” “The intention is that they are convivial,” and so on. In lieu of a catalogue, Hutchins is left to her own words and devices.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins. “My Friend the Poet,” 2019, ceramic, plaster, papier-mâché, collage, chair. 63 x 30 x 33”. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mario Gallucci 

Beyond all that we are left with my favorite, most successful, work, “My Friend the Poet” (2019), a beheaded pink torso, also lacking arms and feet sliding off a flimsy black chair. The precariousness of the poet’s life and the naked delicacy of her expressive vision are perfectly captured, all without a single explanatory note or cue.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.