My Rothko with yellow stripe is a mixed media sculpture by Jessica Stockholder. It is part of Stockholder’s long-running series of two-and-three-dimensional works incorporating discarded consumer waste as an aesthetic medium, the work depicts stacked, atmospheric bands of color evocative of a sideways version of a Mark Rothko painting. Essential to Rothko’s aesthetic position was a notion that his color fields could invoke a sort of transcendent state in the viewer, opening doors of perception that verge on the spiritual. Here, Stockholder is literally creating her transformative composition out of trash. Despite the abstract character of the work, it is a direct challenge to our consumer culture, which lures us into similarly meditative states of ignorance, unaware that our version of spirituality is wrapped up in overconsumption and waste.

Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist whose works are in the collections of many of the most influential museums, municipalities, and corporations around the world. Stockholder formulates three-dimensional pictures in space, which interact in unpredictable ways with the environments they occupy and explore how perception relates to feelings of chaos and control. The work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply. Stockholder mobilizes consumer products and industrial materials as a way to confront the threat they pose to human existence, and to critique the superficial relationship people have with technology and consumption. By incorporating such concepts and objects into her practice, Stockholder imbues the work with myriad levels of meaning and political resonance.

As with all of Stockholder’s work, this sculpture is fundamentally political in nature. It is conceived to awaken our perception of our visual environment, while challenging our assumptions about systems of connection and reliance.