Eight of Pentacles
Margaret Lee
Rebecca Seeman
Jessica Stockholder
Georgina Valverde
Lisa Williamson
Jade Yumang
July 24 — August 28, 2021
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 24th from Noon to 6pm
Face masks are not required, but safety and precaution is encouraged.
RUSCHMAN is elated to present Eight of Pentacles, a group exhibition featuring the nimble practices of Margaret Lee, Rebecca Seeman, Jessica Stockholder, Georgina Valverde, Lisa Williamson, and Jade Yumang. Consistent across these makers’ practices are their keen inquiries into the physical and psychological valences of objecthood, with particular care for the ways that separation and otherness are frequently the predicating orientations for a substantive potential for meaning-making.
Shuttling across spatial axes, vertical structures like Georgina Valverde’s intricately composed steel and crochet structures are less redolent of the monolith and its historical, political posture than they are gracefully vulnerable figures—composites of memory, recycling, and the lives of women after whom each work is dedicated. Adjacently, Rebecca Seeman’s wool and steel constellations are arrayed horizontally into networks of post-minimalist forms suggestive of not only the tools enlisted in their production but in a psycho-poetic process by which the domestic and the rigorously art historic, the global and the cosmic are made to conspire as resources and reference materials for these studies in the dynamics of soft-and-hard interplay.
Object and image are excited in the oblique lexicon of signs from which Margaret Lee works to produce satisfying tensions between sculpture and drawing. Hers is a realm of hyperobjectivity—21st century callback humor to the tchotchke cathexis historically associated with Magritte and an object oriented ontology endemic of the surrealist intelligentsia.
Likewise, object and painting are excited into dialogue through Lisa Wiliamson’s tempering of wit, eroticism, heft, and awkwardness in her carefully attenuated painted metal forms. Maven of painting in the expanded field, Jessica Stockholder has made a life’s work out of substitution fantasies wherein the conventions of painting are supplanted with found color appropriated from superstore aisles of mass production and the even wider landscape of cool, synthy manufacturing under advanced capitalism. The resulting composites serve as fleet forensics by which the tastes, aesthetics, and passions of consumer culture are recounted in circumspection.
This assembly of works is most of all an exercise in measuring the efficacy of abstraction in our present moment—the ways that references are paraphrased and sublimated, the ways that proximity to or distance from a source is marked out physically, in material and gesture. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in Jade Yumang’s textile and mixed media constructions that abstract subtextual queer coding in the legacies of film noir; the interplay between silver screen cinema source material and mélange of fiber art strategies by which they are apprehended into abstracted form demonstrates the means by which desire is made manifest.
Altogether, this conference of artworks affords us the assurance that the forest is, in reality, visible only because of the trees that are themselves dryads, which are to say womxn and queer fae, more or less approximations of our own bodies by which we may perceive this standoff of an/other/ed population of objects.
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Jade Yumang,
His Delicate Constitution,
2016, Polyester, zippers, insulation foam, and PVC pipes, Dimensions variable
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Rebecca Seeman,
Stentors,
2006, Hand-dyed wool, thread, and mixed media, 10h x 120w x 120d in.
Rebecca Seeman,
Blood Moon,
2016, Painted cardboard and reflected colored light, 45h x 45w x 4d in.
Rebecca Seeman,
Blood Moon,
2016, Detail View
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Georgina Valverde,
Beacon (for Bertha Parkhurst),
2019, Crocheted nylon rope, nylon thread, acrylic yarn, wool yarn, plastic bags, and hemp thread, with
plywood and salvaged lath; welded galvanized stainless steel armature, 102h x 28w x 28d in.
Georgina Valverde,
Beacon (for Bertha Parkhurst),
2019, Detail View
Jade Yumang,
It's Not a Love Triangle,
2017, Cotton, lamé, batting, insulation foam, and paillettes, 29h x 24w x 1 1/2d in.
Rebecca Seeman,
Soft Ripened,
2006, Hand-dyed wool and mixed media, 2h x 33w x 33d in.
Margaret Lee,
Solution II,
2018, Wall vinyl, 103 1/2h x 89w in.
Jessica Stockholder,
River run tattoo for you,
2021, Wooden panel, tree bark, cloth, acrylic paint, and Tyvek plastic layer, 6h x 6w x 3/4d in.
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Lisa Williamson,
Body Board (Reverb),
2020, Acrylic, flashe, and microbeads on powder-coated primed aluminum, 80h x 40w x 9 3/8d in.
Lisa Williamson,
Body Board (Reverb),
2020, Detail View
Georgina Valverde,
Vessel (for Mathilde Gartner),
2019, Crocheted nylon rope, nylon thread, acrylic yarn, crocheted wool, and crocheted hemp thread; welded
galvanized steel armature, 60h x 30w x 30d in.
Georgina Valverde,
Vessel (for Mathilde Gartner),
2019, Detail View
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Jade Yumang,
I'll Do Anything for Daddy,
2021, Acrylic, pine, hardware, aluminum blinds, thread, paillettes, cloth-covered cord, and light bulb,
73 1/2h x 73 1/2w x 17d in.
Jessica Stockholder,
Not a fly swatter (After Moholy Nagy),
2021, Plexiglas, metal handle, acrylic paint, Tyvek, fluorescent mesh fabric, hardware, and brackets,
40h x 18w x 6 1/2d in.
Jessica Stockholder,
Not a fly swatter (After Moholy Nagy),
2021, Alternate View
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Eight of Pentacles,
Installation View
Jessica Stockholder,
Human Stain — Stolen title,
2021, Synthetic bag fragment, acrylic paint, and hardware, 18h x 15 1/2w x 3 1/2d in.
Georgina Valverde,
Symbionts,
2021, Pigment print, 24h x 18w in., Editio of 30