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Jessica Joslin:
Lyons Wier Gallery At first it seems a Cartier, commissioned by a charnel house; a Tiffany apprenticed from some Biological Supply. One thinks of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (Touchstone Pictures:1993), where, as with his creatures, the all-too-bizarre aspires to the very sublime... And with great success. Jessica Joslin's "Bestiary" at Lyons Wier Gallery, Chicago, from March 22 - April 20, 2002, has caught many an eye just in the first days of its opening. It is a notable delight. "Bestiary" is in Lyons Wier's Gallery II. Of Joslin's twelve pieces, Lula, a horse-like mount, stands freely on a table; six more pieces are showcased on semicircular shelves covered with oxblood-red leather and edged by tasseled, golden fringing. Joslin's creaturely constructions, Scytha, Quinet, and her ensemble of three -- Alphia, Virdie, Cecil -- are direct wall fixtures. Separate tracklights focus each piece and even here the resulting shadows create a further play of suggestive forms. Although Gallery II is modest in size, a viewer has room to hover closely about the art (these pieces invite such response), and each shift in view transforms a work into an altogether different piece. "Bestiary" offers decidedly dimensional gems. At closer view, Jessica Joslin's "Bestiary" is a jeweler's cabinet, but in these works the artist's inspiration melds mechanics and biology through unconventional materials, and it is the full harmonization of man-made borrowings and natural remnants -- each done with a watchmaker's directed turn of hand -- that lends particular fascination to Joslin's art. Her materials recruit a strange array: adding-machine parts, antique gas fixtures, selected bits of clocks and lamps, miniature machine bolts, springs -- and then there are the bones (entire or sectioned and reworked... as well as facsimiles in cast plastic); brief snippets of fur; and musical instrument keys (even an antique horn for Lopo). The artist underscores speculative construction beyond any mere echoing of natural forms. Rather than weld or solder, she has chosen tiny screws, clasps, threaded joints. Process and materials are meant to be discerned. A pleasure in human ingenuity and facility of hand is celebrated within this art, and it achieves an aesthetic all its own. (This impulse, prior to interchangeable, standardized parts and a consequent assembly line set of mind, was highly prized. The famous 17th and 18th century automatons -- mechanical simulacra -- were individually crafted, unique, and regarded as great wonders in themselves. Even Philip, Duke of Artois at Chateau Hesdin, was celebrated for mechanical beings and birds of metal, all powered by hydraulics.) In "Bestiary," one finds a Wunderkammer: a cabinet of art's own curiosities. Lawrence Weschler, a writer for New Yorker magazine, captured Joslin's Wunderkammer inspiration best when noting:
A number of young artists, Joslin among them, may be evolving a new, more fundamental reintegration of that broken world. Increasingly, science turns to art to conceptualize its models, just as artists grow more aware of science to revitalize their art. Nor should this be confused with any 'interdisciplinary' pastiche of poorly grasped maxims: the packrat facts of academia pulled into art. Before rigor and experiment, science and art find observation, curiosity, the strange: first fantasies.
In "Bestiary," nothing is obvious. Many of Joslin's sculptures are moveable. The gallery notes: "jointed legs, twitching tails, or a beak that opens to reveal a delicate tongue." Left to the visitor's discovery, this trait is more demanding and discreet than the Duke of Artois's water pumps. Jessica Joslin's chimeras reveal to what degree we forget that our inventions and engineering ultimately only analyze and imitate nature. A Buckminster Fuller asks why frail bubbles are so enduring, so tenacious; why bees build hexagonal cells... and then proceeds to engineer the geodesic dome. Struts, supports, joints and levers -- form and function -- were first Nature's, an empirical engineer to which our screws and gears play self-conscious mimicry. Joslin's invention and renewed attention to natural forms and self-generated dynamics expose this fundamental debt. Isabelle (15"x8"x16":2000) is a striking case in point. In this piece, the raptor's skull is, in fact, cast plastic 'bone.' Joslin's chimerical beast is hooded at the nape with an antique shoehorn, a touch one might call monkish, subtly gothic (a la Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis), even -- in a more current fashion -- predatory, romantically 'vampiric.' (Here, one thinks of Ann Rice, albeit in a machine shop.) The wings of Joslin's Isabelle are a frame of umbrella-like struts, threaded by golden core-wrapped wire, a twist like a designer's spiral or Nature's DNA. When viewed from the back, these wings recall arms held behind -- a somewhat sinister echo of Groucho Marx. This art displays wit, ingenuity, insightful curiosity, skill. The legs of Isabelle are cast metal -- chicken ankles with three curved claws, each painstakingly attached by delicate screws. Art historian, James Elkins, once noted that much of the imposing peacock is not lovely, and cites an Arabic poem where that bird complains of "ill feet" and leathery legs. Incongruities, as well as what is shared, are the soul of discernment and discovery. Joslin's invented raptor provokes. And, as the gallery notes, Isabelle indeed does bow and bend.
Left of Isabelle is the miniature wall mount, Scytha (5"x5"x3":2002). It is small, delicate; and, equally, it rears out fearlessly. Here, first impressions are... frilled lizard, miniaturized dragon... one pugnacious mutant sparrow, perhaps deadly. The tiny Jurassic Park collar-flares (or wings, or mutated forearms) are cut shoulder blades of rat. This bisymmetric pair flanks both cheeks below the minute skull, much like aerofoils. The Scytha legs are bone and metal intermixed. Joslin's tiny threat is perched upon a branch baroquely filigreed with gilt fern leaf. (This latter element appears again in Nerva & Nevil as tail 'stings.') Nerva & Nevil (7"x5"x8.5":2000), although small, appear as two bipedal saurians, a natural compromise between Tyrannosaurus rex and scorpions; at war, or perhaps just in a mating dance. Both standing forms are headed with turtle skulls, without front legs or wings, and sport beaded back arches above a spine resembling chicken necks. These latter end in tails capped with a tiny golden frondlet. Both creatures are impossible, and yet so really plausible. In "Bestiary," much attention turns to three marionettes along Gallery II's Eastern Wall. These pieces reconstrue familiar, general forms, but with a playful wit. The artist's inspiration here is sound, albeit devious. Earlier Wunderkammern did at times include batfish and the like, dried and reconfigured into 'mermaids'; and as well the horns of narwhal or rhinoceros transformed to unicorn. (Conversely, the Australian platypus was first taken as a fake by later ages grown sceptical of manufactured mermaids, sewn together from diverse anatomies.) One accepts first fantasies on form. Doubt and details then demystify, but in that process open us to greater truths -- in Art and Science both. Joslin's marionettes do ply familiar forms. And promptly, with delight, thwart any certainties. Padeloup (30"x18"x11":2000), a specimen which hangs by 5 strings from an "X" crossbar, seems a bird: a kiwi, a bittern or a rail. Yet it sports a turtle plastron for a breast. A doubled coathook serves as shoulder blades for what might prove wings. Padeloup is an exercise in what biologist, Tom Eisner, called first fantasies -- what we feel before we analyze. An adjacent piece, Pardo (32"x18"x10":2001), tethered to two strings, is rabbit-like, a created form with hind legs poised to spring. One barely questions prominent incisors backed up by grinding molars: a rodent-like array of teeth. This three-toed pseudo-lagomorph florishes a brass floral ornament as tail -- and has leather pig-like ears, and, like several Joslin specimens, bone and metal legs. In recent years, science has divorced rabbits from the rats and mice: they have a different genealogy. That took us centuries to see, but then, we weren't truly looking. Joslin's bestiary calls a viewer to sharpen wits and ask. Lopo (26"x18"x9":2001), a 'five-stringer,' appears as poodle 'wannabe.' Lopo's skull rests within an antique horn (perhaps a deaf man's aid? The artist is certain it is musical.) This four-toed pet is poodle-cut, with fur puffs at ankles and tail-tip. The brass-bead nose seems a toy-like touch, and Lopo is the only eyeless denizen. As the artist herself explains, "that is how it came about." At far right (South Wall), a visitor encounters Imbert (15"x6"x15":2002). Imbert, together with Capio (18"x6"x15":2002, and reproduced on the gallery's card), flanks, as a pair, Lula (21"x10"x26":2001). Imbert holds finger cymbals in hand (here, as regular hand cymbals), while Capio presents a beggar's cup in which a single die is cast. Lula is mounted as a steed, saddle on mid spine, complete with leather thong bridle, but exhibits a definitely un-equine short neck. And, in hobby horse custom, each leg rests upon a wheel. At immediate right (West Wall), a viewer meets Quinet (12"x7"x14":2000). This is a hanging mount, utilizing a wall lamp base. Quinet is a trophy head, and although its skull is sheep, it mimics a medieval knight's armoured horse (more armadillo than equine). The unicorn horn at forehead follows a frequent middle-ages conceit. Vesta (10"x12"x12":2000) reformulates spider form, but its three pairs of legs, each crafted with a spring at upper joint, defies all but insect lineage. Vesta is robotic pseudo-arachnid, its body recalling a toilet float valve, although two vicious metal fangs discourage impolite analogies. Closer to the gallery exit waits a wall-mount set of three, Alphia, Virdie, Cecil (Each 5"x5"x3":2002), each on its own perch embellished with gilt fern fronds. Alphia is the one with a bifurcate staghorn beetle snout; Virdie is snouted with a metal 'pick'; while Cecil, rightmost, is beaked with a sea horse tail. All three display within floral sconces embellished as baroque fantasia. All these pieces draw upon Jessica Joslin's lifelong fascination with natural science. She did spend time when young at the Acadia Institute of Oceanography in Maine. But, she notes, firsthand stimulus came from a baggie of turn-of-the-century millinery filled with bird wings, heads and tails. The art's evolution -- and evolution it is: stimulus and adaptation -- is curious. Like a living entity the art draws from disposition and environment. Joslin even selects her titles from biographical dictionaries, family genealogies, seeking out obsolete first names -- a penchant for recycling the odds and ends of nomenclature. Ultimately, this art revives a timeless human trait: one documented in Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors by Rosamund Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould (W.W. Norton: 1992). There Gould observed (of Holland's Frederik Ruysch and Russia's Peter the Great) "the need to explore and capture the bizarre found ideal expression in the tradition of collecting then current -- the Wunderkammer, with its emphasis on the exotic, and its keen understanding that fascination often arises from fear." This remains with us, even if sometimes denied. And Joslin's bestiary renews several other innate human sensibilities. Stephen Jay Gould noted in that book: "...two features of seventeenth-century life that are maximally different from our own sensibilities. First, we have banished death from public view as a condition of age best experienced in hospitals and other sequestered places." Gould further observed that: "...death was a persistent and omnipresent (if unwelcome) guest, a companion of all ages and classes. People lived face to face with corruption and disfiguration. If you cannot distance yourself from such a burden, why not make it an object of art, a species of elegance encased in glass?" Gould, evolutionist and humanist, nonetheless continues: "Secondly, how can a post-modern and minimalist age understand the extensive and obsessive ornaments, the emotional exaggerations, both visual and spiritual, of baroque style?" Rough stone and metals grow ever more ornate under the jeweler's art. Rosamund Wolff Purcell, in an artist's afterword to that book, admitted "the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncracies." Purcell concludes not only that "The instinct for creative personal hoarding seems both ancient and widespread," but that, throughout our seeing and selecting, "Mythical creatures have two possible fates: either they are never found and therefore proved imaginary, or they become real. The unicorn horn ground to produce a miracle drug by apothecaries was first reclassified as a narwhal tusk (by Olaus Worm, 1650), among others, and later as the horn of the black rhino." Jessica Joslin's "Bestiary" stimulates a basic impulse, rarely acknowledged openly, which drives much science....
Today, too many of us merely tabulate accepted bits of sight. We are, in our experience, half-alive and blind. And when we read, we wonder "how did they notice that?" ...Observation and imagination. For artists, scientists, for all of us, a dexterous sense of wonder is a very good thing. Jessica Joslin's "Bestiary" is at Lyons Wier Gallery, Chicago, from March 22 - April 20, 2002 in Gallery II. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net are often in print and may be purchased through this magazine's Amazon.com link. Of particular interest is Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors by Rosamund Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould (W.W. Norton & Company:1991). A discursive introduction to Wunderkammern, one which also touches upon art, is Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (Pantheon Books:1995). A brief definition of Wunderkammer appears at http://linux.nscad.ns.ca/~bobr/wcab/whatis.html. James Elkins is cited from The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (Simon & Schuster:1996). |
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