JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS

END OF EVERYDAY LIFE




There were many days in 1998 when I tried to understand what a straight life could look like. It was a crisis of identity and of meaning. My friend Jack and I discovered we could find examples of domesticity and labor in iconic rock and punk images. We restaged Bringing it all Back Home, Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation, the Heartbreakers, Patti Smith’s Easter and Horses, but transformed them from and to another kind of everyday life; one where “You Make Me” is about making a sandwich, and the tie Patti Smith wears on the cover of Horses is the one you wear to your temp job. You gotta put the ketchup of your broken heart back in the fridge, and every one’s gotta eat sometimes.















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Jessica Jackson Hutchins lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’s expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’s works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.