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Jessica Joslin: Strange Nature | Buy Now
Hardbound. 152 pp., 140 full-color plates. Publication date: April 2008
Excerpt from the introduction essay "Myth and Magic: An Introduction to the Work of Jessica Joslin" by Kathleen Vanesian:
Within the phantasmagorical sculptural world of Jessica Joslin, a rose is not a rose, despite poetic assertions of Lost Generation writer Gertrude Stein to the contrary. It may look like a rose, perhaps even feel and smell like a rose, but chances are excellent that, in Joslin's universe, any such floral form would be composed of a variety of puzzle-like parts that have little to do with the traditional worlds of botany or flora.
The artfully imagined skeletal macrocosm that sculptor Jessica Joslin has constructed over the past 16 years teems with elusive three-dimensional mammalian, avian and insect forms. Many of these animals are articulated and movable. They are all painstakingly created from a complex assortment of disparate objects that Joslin has collected from the worlds of nature and of man. The artist baptizes each of her intricately fabricated offspring with whimsical, often mythological, names, including some directly appropriated from her own family's genealogical chart. Not surprisingly, Joslin collects names as obsessively as she does that other detritus and artifacts that fill the small Chicago studio space she has shared with her husband, mentor and sounding board, painter Jared Joslin, for the last fifteen years.
Animal skulls, bird and fish bones, feathers plucked from another millennium's millinery masterpieces, orphaned electric and gas lamps, once fashionable furs harvested from what the artist terms grandma collars, antique silverware, jewelry findings, arcane industrial hardware, Oddfellow ritual regalia, glass eyes -- these and many more esoteric items are cannibalized, recycled and reconfigured by the artist into her unearthly menagerie of preternatural specimens. With consummate craftsmanship, Joslin reaches into this wildly diverse bag of ingredients to magically conjure eerily life-like skeletal sculptures, highly evocative of real members of the animalia kingdom, which she often places within theatrical or historical contexts - all with a wry gothic edge.
