It’s hard to be sure where one work ends and the next begins in “I Do Choose,” Hutchins’s first New York solo show since 2010. Her forms, themes and colors bring discrete pieces into dialogue. Navigating a distinctive and deliberate path through an expanded field of painting and sculpture, Hutchins mines the domestic, rather than the industrial, for materials, upending expectations repeatedly along the way. Chairs play major roles. Self-Reflection is a spindled wooden chair draped with linen upon which an inverted image of the same chair seems to have been rubbed. On the seat is a large ceramic piece whose texture and color unify the elements. Folding chair parts jut out from Seascape, a loose abstract painting with watery imagery that relates to a nearby couch sculpture titled Ultrasuede Wave. A large white chunk of ceramic overfills the beige two-seater, brushstrokes of blue paint coursing onto the iceberg-like hunk and the cushions. Hutchins doesn’t make choices based on good taste; instead an associative narrative emerges as one meanders through the show that draws on, without directly quoting, art history, craft, Americana, the environment and the home.
Pictured: Installation view of “Jessica Jackson Hutchins: I Do Choose”; at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Photo Bill Orcutt. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.