Jessica Oreck, From Where I Am at Available Space Art Projects
Installation view, Jessica Orek’s From Where I Am. Image courtesy Available Space Art Projects.
Jessica Oreck, From Where I Am at Available Space Art Projects
By D.K. Sole
The essence of Jessica Oreck’s contemporary wunderkammers is not the rarity or expense of the objects but the precision of the presentation. I admire the delicacy of her placement, the restrained nonhierarchical massing established by her grids within grids, especially when the material itself is as simple as coloured paper cut into jellybean shapes. (These shapes represent her grandmother’s gems, she explains in her handwritten text.) The grids frame each item like the boxes-in-drawers of her Office of Collecting and Design, giving it privacy and a sort of individualised completeness. The simplicity of her solutions satisfies me a lot. She has to travel? Then her basic unit will be the size of a postcard. She wants something bigger? Then she hangs multiple postcards in formation on the wall. The selection of objects feels as if it has been distilled from an insane range of possibilities: fragments of Japanese fashion patterns for one series, a cyanotype of an egg in Nepal in another, depending on where she was when she was creating each one. A model of her workstation is laid out for us so we can see how portable it is: a neat cutting board, a box for the paper.
Like film frames (she’s also a filmmaker), these grids substitute themselves for a world that is not fully present: they suggest things that can’t be touched or reached. They are “there” but her mediated reconnections make it hard to picture where “there” is, just as the objects in her Office frequently aren’t the thing itself: they’re plastic animals, tiny impractical versions of larger objects, or fragments. I haven’t seen her documentary from 2009, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, but From Where I Am makes me wonder if her interest in Japan encompasses gachapon toys, specifically the ones that mimic chairs, street lights, and other quotidian doodads.
Her materials connect us to each place; the grid fences us out. When I look at the small, cropped egg cyanotype I don’t have the impression of “seeing” Nepal that I would have if she showed it to me in a photograph. I wonder if this presentation is more honest, or if honest is even a useful word here. The present presence of the Nepal cyanotypes is not Nepal itself. Her self-contained mood is very different to that of other Las Vegas collage artists, such as John McVay, Jim White, or the Las Vegas Collage Collective as a whole, where there’s an emphasis on imagery clashing à la Hannah Höch. (With the exception of White’s built-up rectangles that mesh the imagery into an off-white relief.) The prices suggest that she doesn’t want to let go of them.
Jessica Oreck, From Marpha, Nepal, June, 2019. Photo D.K. Sole
Jessica Oreck, From Where I Am
Available Space Art Projects, Las Vegas
September 13-27, 2024
Published by Wendy Kveck on December 9, 2024.