Jessica Stockholder moved to Vancouver in 1960 and maintained not only dual citizenship (Canadian and American), but also a penchant for the landscapes of her childhood. A graduate of the University of Victoria, she produced her first installation in 1983 (My Father’s Backyard) in the backyard of her father’s house, which appeared to her to be a green, flat, rectangle, similar to a canvas, upon which she could create. As with all her works, often created in situ, this installation was destroyed, and is preserved only in photographs. That same year, she began studying painting at Yale, then sculpture — two art forms which, for her, became one. Her installations are created with a unique assortment of materials (furniture, newspapers, rugs, clothing, plaster, plywood, metallic construction remnants) and with very original, for sculpture, use of color: brilliant, varied, bold, abundant, sometimes partially hidden, it splashes across her surfaces and gives structure to her creations. Fabric is often hung in the exhibition space, allowing her to establish a connection, which truly sets her sculptural work apart, between painting and sculpture, two dimensions and three.

“Clothing is like skin for our skin; carpets are like skin for our floors; walls are the skin of our rooms; we see the exterior skin of furniture; and paint acts as a skin on all these skins, including that of the gallery wall. All these skins are mixed and knit together,” she says. Her installations whose poetic titles often begin with gerundial phrases that imply the works are active, have become more and more monumental in scale (Recording Forever Pickled, le Consortium, Dijon, 1991) and embedded in public space (Landscape Linoleum, Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Mideelhiem, Anvers, 1998). In 1999, Stockholder left Brooklyn to direct the sculpture department at Yale. Several retrospectives of her work have taken place in the 2000’s.