Jennifer Stillwell: Grate Expectations
Jennifer Stillwell Grate 2006 Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery
Mid-January must be the time of year when the phrase “the grey everyday” was hatched. With most landscapes drained of colour and only asphalt roadways cleared, there’s definitely a seasonal tendency to dreariness.
Yet if there’s anyone who can inject vibrancy into mundane materials and circumstances, it’s Jennifer Stillwell. The Winnipeg artist has spent almost a decade crafting witty sculptures for venues from New York’s Triple Candie to Montreal’s Darling Foundry. Now, with a solo exhibition on at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, Stillwell chats by phone about Canadian Tire, brain freezes, her new public art project and more.
Leah Sandals: You make art out of materials like fans, heating vents, hardware and furnishings. Is a visit to Canadian Tire or Value Village like a bonanza of inspiration for you?
Jennifer Stillwell: Well, I usually take my initial inspiration from my own experience of things that are around me—in my living space, say, or my studio, stuff that I use in daily life. I look to the formal qualities of everyday things as I relate them to an artistic and creative context. I’m also aware of the precedent of “the readymade” and I sometimes play off that art historical construct.
That said, the materials are usually widely available at Canadian Tire or Home Depot as well. It comes from stuff that pretty much everyone can relate to.
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Jennifer Stillwell Propeller 2004 Installation view detail Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery |
LS: Can you walk me through the works in your current show at Plug In?
JS: Sure. When you first walk into the space there’s Grate, which is a wall vent with tofu kind of protruding. It’s something you could look at really close-up and have a bit of a direct experience with.
And as you walk through the gallery there’s bigger pieces like Propeller. This is a reworking of a piece and performance I did at Pari Nadimi Gallery in 2004. There’s an old box fan that I normally use in my studio in the summertime that’s plugged in. Behind that is five newer, turned-off fans that are just catching the wake of the plugged-in, working fan. The first one behind it moves quite quickly, whereas the one in the back moves pretty slowly. In addition to the fans there’s a series of 12 boards on a plinth. In the initial performance, the fans helped dry the paint on the ends of the boards. The image I always had in my head was of the propeller of a boat pushing water in waves, and the edges of a dock catching its wake—a meeting of speed and the landscape.
I also did a piece called Collisions, where I took a Chevy truck grille and extruded or “cookie cut” sheets of clay through it. Again, it’s more about taking the idea of what a truck grille is about—a representation of power and speed—and taking this very dense form of the landscape to create a sort of representation of movement and time. It can also shift in scale from a tire tread to a cubist landscape.
At the far end of the gallery is a piece called Range that also changes with distance. It’s a panorama of altered Kokanee beer bottles on individual pedestals that create a kind of mountain range.
Then, on a wall across from some large windows there’s the piece Brain Freeze. It looks like a large, abstracted kind of painting, but it’s made out of snowflake symbols that I took from all different sizes of Slurpee cups. I like the abstraction of that idea of what a “brain freeze” might look like. Even in creating the work I had to put a lot of my thoughts on hold, because it was very time-consuming and repetitive. I like to think about how those forms and meanings can layer together.
In a separate room, there’s a video projection of a piece called Wall Plow that I made in 2006. It shows me pushing a piece of white drywall through a room of my studio building towards the camera. To me, it plays with the context of the gallery and of Winnipeg as a kind of snowplow capital.
Finally, there’s another floor sculpture called Gravel Rolls where I took 12 rolls of asphalt felt and half-dipped them in glue and then rolled them in crushed soda crackers. I lined each up behind the other while one roll I left plain and unrolled it into the space. I wanted to give the impression of a paved road going into a gravel road while also acknowledging a domestic process of crushing crackers and the sound of that in relationship to a tire going over gravel. The weight and colour of the materials was also a poetic and formal consideration.
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Jennifer Stillwell Propeller 2004 Installation view Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery / photo Jennifer Stillwell |
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