Episode 75 / JESSICA STOLLER | artist, New York, US | Independent Special 2023
Recorded February 27, 2023, 36 min.
On the occasion of this years‘ Independent Art fair in New York im speaking with Jessica Stoller. She is an artist working in an elaborate way with clay. She mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, which she often displays in overwhelming installations and tableaus. Jessica will be having a solo exhibition with PPOW at this years Independent. Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit the lure and power of making things things with her own hands created meaning and served as a refuge and escape from monotony and conformity of Suburbia for Jessica. She was very comfortable spending time alone having her own inner world and being fascinated with materials and beautiful objects. Growing up catholic, she discusses how the imagery of catholizism influenced her and how visiting an all girls catholic school was very intense, but also empowering and subtly feminist. We discuss her manifold interests and her research about the female body, her own body, the relationship to the world, girl culture, materialism, the meaning of objects, sexism and sexist language, authoritarian regimes and misogyny, decoration, beauty, the grotesque, witch trials, wise women – to which her work at Independent will speak to. She talks her love of clay as material and the special care and attendance it needs and how she explores through it what it means to be a human, a woman in the world at this time and place. This Episode is produced in cooperation with Independent Art Fair, New York City and will be part of the fairs OVR for it’s upcoming 2023 edition.
Shownotes:
https://www.ppowgallery.com/artists/jessica-stoller
Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, harnessing its links to power, desire, and taste. Synthesizing the cultural, historical, and corporeal notions of the female body, Stoller expands the feminist visual vernacular and makes space for subversion, defiance, and play. For Stoller the ‘grotesque’ becomes a powerful tool to challenge patriarchal power structures, as female figures flaunt what they are told to hide, reveling in their own pleasure and abjection. Stoller lives and works in West New York, NJ.