Jess Perlitz
Portland, OR
Reductions of Mountains
On Sunday, September 15, from 12:00 to 2:00 PM, join us on the lawn in front of the Reed library for music, picnic fare, and a conversation with artists Sarah Gilbert, Jess Perlitz, and exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder, facilitated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art at PICA. There will also be tours of Perlitz’s Reductions of Mountains, as well as the Cooley exhibition Tender (a collaboration with Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR).
Access notes: As students are studying in the library, installation visitors are asked to be silent or whisper.
DESCRIPTION
Sculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside a museum diorama. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers her sculptures for examination in the context of two large vitrines in an academic reading room in the Reed College library.
Perlitz has entitled her installation Reductions of Mountains, because ostensibly mountains don’t grow inside libraries. Each vitrine is filled with objects that appear weathered and worn over time—like unearthed artifacts, or concrete rubble from something-that-once-was.
Perhaps they’re the remains of a place—dredged up and put on display to trace human innovation. Maybe they’re the anthropomorphic fragments of an old totemic form in which the representation of the body is now indiscernible. Perlitz’s boulders remind us that we are always categorizing the objects around us and interpreting our lives in fragments, shifting their scale to our needs and desires. The museum display has become a pickle jar.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jess Perlitz (b. Toronto, ON) is an artist whose work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. She is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently an Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz is a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, a Joan Shipley awardee, and an award recipient from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; Cambridge Art Galleries, ON; De Fabriek, NL; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project Chorus is installed at Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.