Jessica Stockholder: Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood

June 26 to December 31, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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In the 1880s an ash tree sprouted in a field that one day would be the Sculpture Garden of The Aldrich Museum. It is unknown why this tree was allowed to grow and prosper in this location, but by 1964, when the earliest existing photograph of it was taken, it stood by itself and was already nearing one hundred feet in height.

In the 1960s the culture of wood was very much present in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver was initially settled in 1867 for the logging of the area’s rich temperate rainforest, and forestry grew to become the city’s largest industry with wood and wood products traded on an international scale. Growing up near the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Jessica Stockholder frequently ventured into the University’s adjacent forested parkland. “I must have been six or seven years old,” Stockholder recalls, “and in the forest there was a carved wood bear totem that we used to climb on. It is one of my earliest memories of sculpture.”

As it turned out, the sculpture was the work of Haida artist Bill Reid, one of a small group of Native artists who were keeping the carving traditions of the indigenous Northwest Coast peoples alive. From the Tlingit people, whose homeland is the southeast Alaska coast, to the Chinook, whose original territory

Jessica Stockholder: Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood

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stretched south of the mouth of the Columbia River, the region surrounding Vancouver hosted numerous indigenous cultures with spectacular woodcarving traditions. In the 1960s, with the spread of the Native Rights Movement, the carving of cedar trees into totem poles and other outdoor sculpture was exhibiting a rebirth in the hands of a new generation of Native artists. These works, along with historical woodcarvings in the UBC Museum of Anthropology’s collection, left a powerful and lasting impression on Stockholder.

The ash on the Museum’s property began to exhibit ill heath during the summer of 2006. After consulting with an arborist it was discovered that the tree was suffering from an infestation of the larvae of the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that was accidentally introduced into the US from Asia in the 1990s. Much like the chestnut blight of the early part of the twentieth century, the infestation by the ash borer was setting off alarm bells in the eastern half of the US. The American ash was a major component of the region’s hardwood forests, with a population of an estimated 7.5 billion trees stretching from Texas to Nova Scotia. Sadly, after several years of deep root feeding and judicious trimming it became apparent that The Aldrich’s specimen ash was nearing the end of its life.

The ash had been such a major presence in The Aldrich’s Sculpture Garden that the position and alignment of the Museum’s new building was partially determined by sight lines to the tree. Because of its prominence, a consensus formed among the Museum’s staff that the ash should in some way be utilized by an artist, rather than simply being cut up for firewood. With major branches in danger of falling off (and the associated concern about public safety) the tree was removed in the spring of 2009. The trunk and major limbs were transported to a local sawmill, cut into dimensional lumber, and then brought to a barn in Ridgefield for air-drying. The question of what to do with the wood was put on hold as the wood naturally cured, a process that would take two years.

When the idea of giving the ash to an artist returned to the fore in 2010, it was natural that initial thinking turned towards those who were known for working with wood. Lists of possible participants were compiled and conversations were started with a broad range of individuals from both the design and art ends of the spectrum. Coincidently, these conversations were happening during a period of ongoing dialogue with artist Jessica Stockholder about the potential of the artist producing a new project in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. During one of these conversations, the subject of the tree came up, and it quickly became apparent that the artist had a deep and complicated interest in trees, which was surprising, as she was well known for ephemeral abstraction primarily made from a palette of synthetic, man-made materials and objects. The thinking about what to do with the tree changed overnight: let’s give it to someone who is not known for working with wood, an edgier and ultimately more interesting proposition that would expand Stockholder’s concerns into new territory.

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Stockholder’s thought process led to using the wood in two separate, but related installations. In the Museum’s Opatrny Gallery, the artist proposed two freestanding sculptures that resembled folding screens, offset by a skewed plane dropped from the gallery’s ceiling. In the adjacent Sound Gallery, Stockholder wanted to use a selection of rough boards (planed, but not squared up ), informally arranged around the perimeter of the gallery with a band of applied imagery that echoed the height of the space’s mullioned north window. Elements of these two schemes clearly had precedents in Stockholder’s previous work, but the use of the wood had triggered new associations with both trees and, most interestingly, the stylized abstraction of Northwest Coast Native art.

In recent years Stockholder and her husband, the painter Patrick Chamberlain, had begun collecting prints by contemporary Native artists from the Vancouver area. Stockholder and Chamberlain’s eyes were drawn by the works’ lively organic abstraction, based in a formal vocabulary that is both strict and playful. For Stockholder, however, there was something else: that subtle and hard-to-describe character which infuses art that is dependent on a specific landscape. Just as Cezanne’s paintings were critically informed by a lifetime spent in the landscape of Provence, Stockholder’s childhood in British Columbia left an indelible impression rooted in both the landscape and the remains of the indigenous cultures. In fact, the art of the indigenous cultures was inseparable from the landscape: the fields of totem poles were part of the surrounding forest, not mere objects placed there. Similarly, Stockholder’s work has consistently avoided the intrinsic “objectness” of sculpture by engaging space in a complex, pictorial manner. Turning the old aphorism on its head, Stockholder’s sculpture (and installations) are more like the forest than the trees.

Once Stockholder’s ideas for use of both the wood and the gallery spaces had gelled, the artist and the Museum’s staff focused on the practical considerations of the plan. The freestanding “folding screen” elements, although simple in design, would require modestly sophisticated woodworking skills to fabricate. With the installation of freestanding boards, Stockholder was interested in the idea of repeating, in different colors and orientations, a group of related drawings on their surfaces.

These two situations led to Stockholder collaborating with cabinetmaker Clifford Moran on the woodworking aspects, and with fine art screenprinter Gary Lichtenstein on the application of imagery to the boards. Moran expanded small paper maquettes made by the artist into the full-scale wood screens, and Lichtenstein took Stockholder’s drawings and enlarged them photographically to produce seven separate silkscreens for printing on the boards. The application of the hand-painted imagery on the freestanding screens was accomplished in The Aldrich’s workshop with the help of Rich Cooke, the Museum’s head preparator/facilities manager, and Chris Manning, his assistant.

From the beginning of the project Stockholder’s thoughts kept going back to the formal character of Native art from the Vancouver region. Even to those who are not generally familiar with Native art, the aesthetics of the indigenous

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peoples of the Northwest Coast are strikingly singular. Besides their general sinuous and curvilinear nature, they share the common element of emphasis and exaggeration of the eyes in the beings represented. Indeed, the eyes on some sculptures are their dominant feature, particularly on the totem poles where the repetition of eye-forms acts as a powerful unifying element. Stockholder went into the drawing of the colored forms for both installations intending to consciously reference the shape of the eye. Coming from an artist who is not known for traditional representational imagery, this might seem to be a surprise, but in Stockholder’s case it not only represents an acknowledgement of Native aesthetics, but also a deep connection with early Modernist abstraction when artists were distilling representation into pure, abstract elements. Throughout her career, Stockholder has resisted the labels of both “Modernist” and “Postmodernist” to describe her work. Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood is the latest example of work by an artist who consistently follows visual inquiry in ways that defy expectation.

One feature of the spaces that Stockholder was working with, the galleries’ windows, became a critical element in the two resulting installations. Looking out on the surrounding landscape, the windows function as eyes for the Museum’s building, directing visitor’s attention when it is not focused on the interior spaces. (The floor-to-ceiling east window in the Sound Gallery faces the location

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where the ash tree spent its life.) In an effort to even more pointedly connect the Opatrny Gallery’s interior with the outside world, Stockholder utilized three convex security mirrors as part of the installation. Clearly resembling eyes, the mirrors not only gaze out of the windows into the surrounding landscape, but also re-present the gallery’s interior in its totality. The band of screenprinting on the boards in the Sound Gallery continues the horizon defined by the space’s north mullioned window, as well as corresponding to the height of the viewer’s gaze, with the imagery continuing on printed Mylar covering the gallery’s larger east window.

Stockholder’s work consciously walks the line between sculpture, installation, assemblage, and painting. Originally trained as a painter, she left the confines of the canvas to pursue the “push and pull” of color and form in three-dimensional space. Her work continually reflects on the nature of painting and the way that it is dependant on architecture (paintings are made to hang on walls). In the installation in the Opatrny Gallery, the two freestanding folded sculptures are surrogates for walls (in much the way painted Asian folding screens function) and are covered with pictorial elements as well as window-like apertures that connect the painted forms with the physicality of the wood. A frequent actor in the artist’s installations is the dropped ceiling, here appearing in its usual role

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of making the viewer conscious of the artificial (and limiting) nature of interior architectural space. The entire space has been animated, but without directly engaging the gallery’s walls.

But what of the presence of the ash tree in all of this? Stockholder has taken this opportunity to bring her continuing concern with the transient nature of visual phenomena into direct collision with the permanence that trees represent. Trees as static, long-lived beings are witnesses to the slow changes in the environment, and the beautiful grain of their wood is a yearly almanac of their circumstances. Trees are literally the “eyes of the world” and the knots in their grain are pupils looking into history. North America’s Native peoples intimately knew this, and the threat of the extinction of the American ash sadly represents another chapter in the landscape’s loss of memory. In Stockholder’s words, “The movement of the body through the gallery is quick and fleeting as compared to the one hundred and twenty-five or so years the ash tree lived in the yard. The drop ceiling is fleeting compared to the longer life proposed by the folding screens. The blood moves in our veins quickly compared to the quiet unseen movement in the cells of the dead wood. Our efforts to hang on to knowledge of history, of time passing, are expressed both verbally and visually.”

Richard Klein, interim co-director

1 From a conversation with the artist on April 1, 2011.

2 Frank Lowenstein, Invasive Species: The Race to Save Ash Trees in America, The Nature Conservancy, May 4, 2011 >http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/forests/explore/emerald-ash-borer-q&a.xml>.

3 The American ash (fraxinus americana) is also referred to as the white ash due to the light color of its heartwood. Its straight grain and resilient nature led it to be used as the wood of choice for items such as baseball bats, tool handles, and most recently, solid body electric guitars.

4 After milling, it was estimated that the usable wood from the tree totaled approximately 1,200 board feet. (One board foot equals a volume of 1 x 12 x 12 inches.)

5 Conversations with the artist revolved around her interest the 2005 book The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant. The nonfiction book interweaves a tale of Native spirituality, the history of the timber industry in British Columbia, and the act of a deranged individual that resulted in the criminal destruction of a unique tree sacred to Native peoples.

6 In the world of woodworking, rough boards that are not squared up (particularly with remaining bark) are referred to as having a “live edge.”

7 Stockholder has always had a keen interest in the work of Emily Carr (1871–1945), a Canadian painter who lived in Victoria, British Columbia, and combined Post-Impressionist and Fauvist influences with an interest in Native art. Carr’s and Stockholder’s work is connected by different responses to the Pacific Canadian landscape.

8 A group of Modernists known as the “Indian Space Painters” coalesced in New York during the 1940s. The artists, influenced by the abstract qualities of Native American art, particularly that from Northwest Coast cultures, included Gertrude Barrer, Will Barnet, Peter Busa, and Steve Wheeler.

9 From a statement by the artist written on December 24, 2010.

The artist and the Museum are grateful to Moran Woodworking, Ridgefield, CT; Gary Lichtenstein Editions, Ridgefield, CT; and The Aldrich’s head preparator/facilities manager, Richard Cooke, and facilities/exhibition assistant, Chris Manning, for their assistance in realizing the works in this exhibition.

All works courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

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The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees

Mark L. Goldstein, Chairman; John Tremaine, Treasurer/Secretary; Annadurai Amirthalingam; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Eric G. Diefenbach; Chris Doyle; Linda M. Dugan; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Meagan Julian; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Donald Opatrny; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

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