Killer Maker: Justine Kurland and Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents Killer Maker, a conversation with art objects between Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Justine Kurland.

Killer maker. The two words taken together can suggest many things: the harsh reality of life’s cycle, a cosmic balancing act, an impossible binary that circles back in on itself. The simultaneously adversarial and harmonious nature is where Hutchins’ assemblages of ceramics, furniture, papier-mâché, and paint and Kurland’s photographs staged in the American West converge. Both artists refuse motherhood’s embrace (Hutchins has described it as “un-knowing” and Kurland as “abdication”): of authority, of resolution, of fixity.

Hutchins’ small gouaches, explorations of the shape of color, show figures enmeshed in the landscape, undulations of pigment that recline on, drape from, and melt into their surroundings. Her polyvalent assemblages of paint, ceramic, and papier-mâché—accumulated onto paper or combined with upholstered and wooden furniture—are scrappy, raw, and sensuous in their intuited handmade construction. They resist an all-over, cohesive understanding, instead offering discordant unions that mine the meaning in the objects we live with. In one sculpture an armchair becomes a body, its soft flesh taking shelter under a papier-mâché shell, itself topped with a splayed-open peel of ceramic. In the wall reliefs organic but amorphous forms resonate with the pregnant and recently pregnant bodies in Kurland’s photographs. In a direct quote of the work and a nod to their two-decade friendship, Hutchins lovingly collages fragments of Kurland’s photographs into the pulped paper growths.

In Kurland’s photographic series Of Woman Born (2004–2007), groups of nude women, pregnant and with young children, dot the vast landscape—they appear nestled in a towering rock formation, bathing at the base of a waterfall, or converging in a clearing in the woods, dappled with sunlight. The title Of Woman Born is borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 feminist text and aligns Kurland with Rich’s mission to untangle the construct of motherhood. Nearly twenty years after they were made, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade’s protections casts the questions posed by these photographs into sharper light. Without reproductive freedom, is there any such thing as motherhood? Would we still be raping, pillaging, and extracting natural resources if we considered the earth a father instead of a mother? Or would the earth be revered the way the heavenly father is?