Reception: Saturday, May 14 from 1—4pm 

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present No Relief, an exhibition of new ceramic sculptures and works on  paper by Jessica Jackson Hutchins. No Relief will be on  view at the gallery May 14 through July 11, 2022.  

Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ expansive practice includes sculpture, painting, collage, video, and installation.  Well-known for her sprawling, layered sculptural assemblages composed of an array of everyday objects,  some found, some personal, Hutchins explores and pushes materials, media, and meaning. The artist’s  formally inventive works are accumulations of mundane rituals transformed into reverential objects  that are as idiosyncratic as they are familiar. Through touch and accretion, Hutchins celebrates the meaning  and emotion of relationships, time, and language,  utilizing form, color, and reference to illuminate the  connections between ourselves, the world, and the  generative interactions therein.  

For No Relief, Hutchins presents new mixed media  works that recast the quotidian in thoughtful and  evocative ways. Ceramic sculptures gesture towards  recognizability—a head, a torso, or arm. The  forms splay, lean, and flaunt their presence into the  surrounding space, interacting with and implicating  the viewer, while gestural glazes in earthy pinks,  greens, and browns build emotional intensity. At times  they resemble broken ancient statuaries, but instead of conjuring visions of an idealized past, Hutchins’  bodies—scarred, broken, and indented with the  maker’s fingers—are situated in the present and speak  rather to fragility, pathos, and imperfection. Hutchins’  approach to art-making allows for the sculptures to  extend outward from objecthood and art history into  other systems that organize our lives and thinking,  along the way challenging hierarchies of form,  materials, value, and aesthetics.  

Also on view is a new series of relief papier mâché  works, made while the artist was in residence at  Macdowell in early 2022. In these wall-based pieces  Hutchins returns to impulses of care and comfort,  healing and repair that can be found in her early  milagros sculptures—a toe for Darryl Strawberry,  a tongue for Syd Barrett—and continue to drive  her work. Hutchins fashions these mysterious  relief abstractions using the humblest materials and  yesterday’s news. She transforms the graphic qualities  of language into abstractions that point to the fluidity,  nuance, and impermanence of speech that often belie  systems of codification. In Hutchins’ work, stability  and authority are conceits that work to undermine, or at  the very least obscure truth. In one work, an asteroid like shape tenuously bridges two sheets of paper, a  formal reminder of the delicate connections that bridge 

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Pheromone’s  

Amber Rose, 2022, papier mâché relief on paper with