Jessica Stockholder is inspired by the relationships she perceives between colors and objects in her everyday visual environment. Her work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply.

Graduated Tipped Stack is emblematic of Stockholder’s consideration of “readymade” consumer products, manufactured objects, and industrial materials—the cast-off physical residue of human civilization—as artistic mediums as valid as paint, stone, or glue. Formulating such quotidian items as hardware, toy parts, and plastic baskets into a three-dimensional picture in space, she instigates unpredictable interactions between viewers and the environment they share with the work. The piece belongs to Stockholder’s Stack series, which further addresses how methods of display become part of objects existing in exhibition spaces. Each Stack sculpture features what would typically be thought of as the artwork, atop a traditional institutional pedestal that is itself atop a sculptural pedestal. Sandwiching standard pedestals between sculptures, the series, like Stockholder’s critically acclaimed Assist series, blurs the distinction between art object and its pragmatic display.

Whether it manifests as an object, such as this sculpture, or as an immersive, experiential installation, Stockholder’s work is consistently rooted in a larger concern: people’s perception of their visual surroundings, and how that perception relates to feelings of chaos and control.