September 22, 2017 – January 14, 2018
Joe and Marité Robinson Strolling Gallery, and Main Gallery
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901

Alongside her oil paintings, Julia Jacquette is showing a suite of text-image gouaches on paper she titles Playground of My Mind. This unique book-form graphic narrative, splendidly published in 2017 by the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College (where this exhibition originated and accompanying installation shots were taken) explains a good deal about the methodical fun that characterizes her painting.

Playground begins with a supergraphic portrait of the artist hand-in-hand with her mother, striding forward circa 1970 in a “strikingly minimal” (as the text puts it) blue wool coat inscribed with a red circle. Design in Jacquette’s family was a progressive force. “Less is more,” her mother says of an over-ornamented Christmas tree in the lobby of the modernist public housing tower where they live. Jacquette’s carefully crafted pagespreads –– distilled from snapshots into deft grisaille with rare spots of color –– describes and, indeed, demonstrates how the artist’s upbringing was design-centric and infused with feminist pride. From “deep play” toys to innovative, modular playgrounds, she was taught defiance of garish patterns and of the over-ornamented, passive version of womanhood peddled by Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

The bulk of paintings in the current show are canny photorealistic zooms into exactly such luxuriously soft targets: glittery fashion and jewels, cosmetics, scotch on the rocks, pools and yachts, movie star lips and hairdos. If her debts to the three Rs –– Rosenquist, Richter, and Ruscha –– are obvious, so is the potency of the lessons learned about reviving skillful painting through emulating, not the photograph per se, but the image of the photograph. In Reclining (2014) and Actress, Gold Dress (2015) Jacquette takes guilty pleasure in close-cropped mirages of pearls and klieg-lit skin, depth of field and lens flare. Heidi Klum Throws Glitter (2012) is a quietly dazzling abstraction. Closer in spirit to Vermeer than to Audrey Flack’s or Marilyn Minter’s operatic treatment of similar material, the paintings are hermetic in their even-tempered, unfussy surface. Every mystery of appearance is resolved and blended to a sheen.

Jacquette put her mark on this atelier approach to media seduction in the 1990s by adding ambiguous, possibly personal texts that accumulate into overt feminist dissent. A couple of paintings on view restate this signature approach. In Thirty-six Sofas (2104) the titular subjects are cleanly differentiated with saturated color, as in a superstore catalogue. Below are 36 sentences labeling not the furniture, but thoughts of inadequacy, such as “A relentless self-judging inner narrative,” and ” Guilt about experiencing pleasure.” Do these assessments come from a coruscating diary, a self-help manual or a psych ward evaluation? In any case, the collision with the plush sofas is diagnostic, providing an oblique view into the alienation of consumer capitalism. Another text/image painting, Your Every Word (2014), is a stand-in for a large body of work in which romantic pathos delicately intrudes upon luscious desserts. Here, an array of flawless parfaits, whose vivid, slightly stiff illusionism feels like taxidermy, is tagged by the rebus, “Your Every Word a Perfect Jewel and Knife in My Own Heart.”Disciplined, cool, yet in love with excess, Jacquette’s paintings manage to critique her cake and eat it. Although Playground of My Mind says nothing about the source of Jacquette’s pathos –– defying the voyeuristic conventions of the autobiographical novel –– it makes abundantly clear how she comes by her design acumen.

If Jacquette’s story begins with her mother, it centers on her father, a landscape architect during a dazzling moment initiated by New York City parks commissioner Thomas Hoving, future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Playground design, cookie cutter during the long Robert Moses era, was suddenly open to liberal ideas of child development and Bauhaus-inspired design. The artist narrates how her father and his partners were responsible for building audacious and imaginative meccas of free play, in particular in Central Park, that exceeded even the best European paradigms. Richard Dattner’s pioneering Adventure Playground, built in 1966, and Ross Ryan Jacquette’s Discovery Playpark, following in 1973, brought principles of modularity and geometry, but also non-linear variation, earthy textures, and ancient, monumental forms to generations of lucky New York children and urbanites in general. With keen insight from a child’s perspective, and in documentary detail and lucid schematics, Playground of My Mind resurrects the optimism of that ambition. (Disclaimer: my own father was an architect during those halcyon, or at least less dystopian times and worked with some of these designers, making Jacquette’s story in many ways my own.)

Playground is both a moving filial tribute and a required architectural history. It is also a design polemic, in which the medium is the message. In ways that recall David Mazzucchelli’s masterful graphic novel, Asterios Polyp (2009, Pantheon), a gripping metafiction about an architect, Jacquette deploys architectural wit in telling her tale, which unfolds (and folds) through plans and isometrics, diagrams and visual puns. At one point Jacquette asks, of childhood fun and games: “Can beautiful design teach us?” In fact, Playground educates the eye. Read the book and then give it to a kid –– and then take that kid to one of the playgrounds Jacquette eulogizes. Even after cheesy, risk-averse modifications, these still work their magic.

The post “Playground of my Mind”: Julia Jacquette Educates the Eye appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201602281″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Colleen Asper, Ariella Budick, and Jeffrey Kastner joined David Cohen to discuss Julia Jacquette at Anna Kustera, Josephine Meckseper at the FLAG Art Foundation, Rob Pruitt at (Public Art Fund) Union Square, and Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met.

The post May 2011: Colleen Asper, Ariella Budick, and Jeffrey Kastner with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

The post May Review Panel Line Up appeared first on artcritical.

Mar 5 – Apr 3, 2004

Sometimes things change so gradually we don’t see it at all until we first look away and then, returning our gaze, do we find that nothing is as it was. This can be the case with places, people or things – a little bit here, a tiny bit there, and suddenly everything is changed forever. A common experience for most of us; yet the accumulation of nearly imperceptible alterations into a new reality can have uncanny effect.

Julia Jacquette is one of those artists who make the smallest of changes from one body of work to the next. Many of her shifts are so subtle that one would have to be very astute to notice them, even in works done a few years apart. What a shock then to see her recent exhibition at Michael Steinberg Gallery where, after a particularly long hiatus between solo exhibitions, all of those tiny steps have added up to one very large jump.

There is, of course, the growth in technique. Jacquette has grown over the years from a young painter with adequate skills to a mature painter of exceptional technique. That a painter should, via long experience with their materials, become ever more proficient makes sense, but as it is not a given among today’s artists, it is worth mentioning. I’m not one of those who believe that painting is all about technique (especially with young artists). However, if painting matters, then ability of the artist to tune and align their technique to their content would logically lead to more potent artworks.

Conversely, while being a good painter may make one a good illustrator, it does not necessarily make one a good artist. As Jacquette has always mined illustration for subject matter, the line between rendering, image, and content is a pivotal issue in the understanding of her work. Indeed, her earliest works presented this three part dialogue in fairly unadorned terms.

A typical painting from that time might be of an intricate dessert, such as a Napoleon, presented on a plate dead center in the composition. The surrounding area would be a solid color devoid of perspective, while just below the plate would be a short, simple hand painted caption along the lines of “your eyes”. Think early Pop art with a more overt sexual agenda, with a dash of Magriette thrown in for good measure.

Jacquette eventually dropped the text, but her interest in found images, specifically those used in advertising, intensified. The works grew larger, and she began to break them into grids. Works from this period might be composed of twenty hands or sixteen eyes or thirty-six sets of lips – all apparently lifted from fashion illustrations. It was as if the artist was creating lexicons of consumerist images, while the loving care that went into each painting left no doubt that consumer number one was Jacquette herself.

The eight main paintings in Jacquette’s most recent exhibition continue to make use of the grid, advertising images and even, in some cases, desserts. They are, in short, superficially identical to the artist’s preceding works. Yet even a cursory viewing leaves the viewer with a far different impression than the early works, and one is sent scrambling to ascertain how, if so little has changed formally, what is responsible for such a radical shift in perception?

The answer resides in Jacquette setting up a greater juxtaposition between two aspects that one might naturally assume to be mutually exclusive. Specifically, the new paintings are far more abstract, while simultaneously the imagery has become more precise and thematically layered.

In explaining how the artist pulls this off, it is easier to start with the abstraction which is, to be honest, the result of a clever slight of hand. As was the case with the earlier work, these paintings are made up of grids. Inside each square in the grid is an object, and the same type of object fills the entire painting. For instance, one painting is all cakes; another painting is all bouquets, while another is all dresses. What Jacquette has done differently, though, is to enlarge each image so as to make it appear as a detail that fills its respective box. The result: identity is retained, but contours are destroyed. More importantly, not only is the overall form of the discreet object negated, it is replaced with the outline of its container, the grid, and made to butt up against related, identically manipulated images on all sides. Whereas the works that came before presented their grids as self contained chapters, the grid fragments in the new works now form a highly abstracted, unified whole.

The narrative layering of the imagery is more subtle, but ultimately functions in a similar manner. Again, as with the earlier works, Jacquette’s overarching concept remains the same and she continues her playful exploration of desire and consumption using found images from advertising. The image selection, however, has become more tightly focused. As the titles suggest – “White on White (Nine sections of wedding cake)”, 2001; “White on White (Sixteen kinds of flowers), 2002; “White on White (Wedding Dresses) II, 2002 – the series’ subjects are unified by the color white (a formal tongue-and-cheek evocation of both Sargent and Ryman) as well as theme. These are not just cakes, flowers, and dresses, but wedding cakes, wedding dresses and bridal bouquets.

As Jacquette was recently married it might, at this point, seem clever to assume a personal agenda on Jacquette’s part. To do so risks underestimating the artist’s intent – a long running and broad cultural commentary – and definitely under appreciates her wit and humor. Look closer and we see that besides the bouquets, the decorations on the cakes and dresses are flowers as well. The artist has, in fact, painted flowers and representations of flowers in every painting.

Jacquette levels the imagery via her choice of a single, unifying, “white on white” palette and floral imagery. In putting everything into a comparative grid, she has effectively flattened the meaning of icons that are supposed to represent a special moment for our culture. Not a wedding cake, but wedding cakes, not a bride but brides; each thing special, but not unique. And it can be taken further, for it is not just the pastries and the bouquets that are being equated, but the brides as well. Together they are all beautiful, sweet, and luscious – not to mention packaged, commodified, and sold.

Previously, Jacquette would entice viewers with clever images and pointed questions. Seduction via butter cream brush work is now her preferred form of attack, while her subtext, like a worm in an apple, remains hidden.

The post Julia Jacquette appeared first on artcritical.