Untitled
(complicate, devotion, dualism, evidence, fraternize, gap, interpretation, naiveté, riddle, unsettle) 2018

by
Jess Portfleet
BFA, Northern Michigan University, 2005

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART+ DESIGN

2018

© Jess Portfleet, 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

abstract

1

complicate

1

devotion

2

dualism

4

evidence

6

fraternize

9

gap

12

interpretation

13

naiveté

14

riddle

18

unsettle

19

verdict

22

Notes

26

List of Figures

30

Stuff, objects and things (abstract)

The following essay includes information that surrounds my investigations into the human desire to invest
in objects. This writing accompanies questions concerning systems built for, by, and with things, as well
as the possibilities of breaching those boundaries. Explorations around what becomes available in this
stuff when significance becomes both flexible and untethered are considered from separate, sometimes
overlapping vantages within my practice. Using complicate, devotion, dualism, evidence, fraternize, gap,
interpretation, naiveté, riddle, and unsettle as anchor points, I contemplate the real and sensual, the
emotional and physical, experiences that objects provoke in all types of possible relationships.
Introduction to organization (complicate)

In some ways this work should be relatively easy to write about; the forms are derivative, they can be
traced back to found object referents. They are plainly situated in an available history of cast ceramics
and handwork in textiles. The palette is not overly sophisticated and easy to attribute to ceramic surfaces,
acrylic paint and domestic materials. Their refusal of the pedestal, use of the interstitial space where the
wall meets the floor, and the direct and temporal mark-making can all be readily placed in contemporary
practice.
There are also other more complicated details that could be speculated about; What role does materiality
play? What is the relationship to the changing identity of formalism, craft, labor, fetish, etc.? A summary
and description of these objects would then be complete if these installations were composites only of
forms that are mimetic, but this 1:1 approach makes no accommodation for that which is best known
through absence.
There are a lot of correct things that can be written about this work that are not the work itself. These
pieces are objects and any attempt to know them through words starts with translation which implies a
certain infidelity. I am interested in the specific shape of these failures and the further clues they offer.
What questions are opened up when these objects cannot be fully apprehended by rationally and by
description? Although necessarily rooted in the bounds of language, I would argue that what is not said
between these pieces, offers more potent information. It would be a disservice to suggest that this work
can be fully received by describing and summing its physical attributes. All of these ideas put into words
form a cheering crowd, threatening to drown the objects themselves out. In Pamplona, you have a better
chance of being trampled by other individuals running from the bulls, than you do of making contact
yourself. The spectators become the sport. The traditional purpose of this paper is to offer support and
framing to the work, I have organized this writing in acknowledgment of the risk of the work being
trampled by naming the most accessible and least disputable points outright.
Rather than accepting the partial construct that is offered by words as a failure inherent to the medium, I
have elected to collect this writing in a way that exploits what cannot be said and honors the inchoate
connections that exist outside the semiotic1. I have framed the writing in sections that instead of

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following a linear flow, sit more adjacent to one another. This is achieved through arranging the ideas by
alphabetical order of the subheadings of complicate, devotion, dualism, evidence, fraternize, gap,
interpretation, naiveté, riddle, and unsettle, resulting in more of a list than a progression. Although
potentially confounding to the immediate and complete description of my practice, alphabetical
organization is employed as it is a method that follows the logic of letters (which are the material of
language).
A list is a grouping of potentially disparate ideas or items that can best be made sense of in relationshipwhether to each other or to an initial concept. List making accepts possible hierarchies and redundancies
without relying on static structure. Lists are open-ended, chameleonic and fragmented. I see the
resultant gaps between sections as possibilities similar to the spaces between the other elements of my
work. Lists or litanies2 have the ability to democratize, to present together literal, physical and
conceptual. The proximity in the organization of this writing is intended to create pause as the reader
bridges the space in-between. This is an attempt to include those parts for which there are no words, or
where accuracy gives way to subjectivity, to give face to spaces that might otherwise be left out of
language or dismissed with labels such as coincidental or intuitive. The seemingly arbitrary or alphabetical
organization of this writing is meant to complicate singular and immediate understanding by creating a
fragmented linkage that speaks just as much to difference as it does to similarity.
Security blanket (devotion)

Fabric is soft, it is of the body- on the body, on the bed, swaddled, bandaged, sanitary, conceived of by
hands. It is contained, fibers bound together, it is spooled or rolled in balls, it is waiting, it is more
potential. It covers and wraps as a shell, taking on the shape as it protects. I use this material to create a
collection of tiny and imperfect knots, each one an individual record of the motion of my hand. So many
loops linked together, fastened to one another, creating a net, blanket or pad. As objects they show
marks of repetition, accumulation, obsession; in installation they become part of the organization. These
pieces are in service, at the ready, an embodiment of preparation, permanence and durability. They are
flattened color drawings, sculptural collections and domestic settings. Tiny knots are tied, one at a time,
over and over again to create a tuft, cushion or carpet, a gentle demarcation (figure 8). In their history is a
stockpile of attention that cares for, makes secure, and builds, a world.
In this process, I allow the material to take some responsibility for the shape of the work. I do not crochet
masterfully, yet continue to loop the yarn. My lack of skill in this medium is apparent in the holes and
abrupt pattern shifts. I have not presented row upon row of uniform stitches, polished and straight as
soldiers. My army has blemishes, gaps, literal openings and confused directions. These interruptions are
markers that remove the threat of perfection and anonymity. Each motion brings me back into this work.
The artist and writer Jessica Stockholder connects the personal work of the artist to the greater
implications of labor, as she points out:

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Now we are aware of very little, if any, of the making of the things we need. It happens elsewhere,
often overseas. We are able to have many things because they don’t cost what they would if we
ourselves were the makers. Where Marx worried about alienated labor—the effect of workers
making things that they themselves could not afford to buy—today we experience the opposite (but
no less alienating) phenomenon of being able to buy things that we could not afford to make.3
Stockholder references time as a commodity that might be considered wasted in creating these soft
pieces, the end product is simply not worth it. Part of my interest is in the challenge of time that can be
given, wasted, spent, passed, used and saved in relation to handwork. For this body of work, it is
necessary that these textiles are made by hand and by me, that they display productivity and also that
they are inefficient. Thousands of wool strings are looped one by one by my hand, into carpets that serve
only as a soft record. They are the evidence of my attention, a devotional. I breathe in and out, my
fingers move and together we control or catalogue the future through careful pacing… one knot, one
row… The resultant wool forms are reminiscent of decorative textiles used primarily to cloak, comfort,
domesticate4, or feminize. The specificity of their shape implies function, their softness and palette
suggests personal affects, materials that are in service to bodies (figure 1).
There is a futility inherent to this gesture. Because these rows of knots are easily and more accurately
accomplished by machines, they beg the question of extravagance. The consumer choices are just as soft,
yet cheap and often disposable. There is a paradox of distance at play here. Domestic textiles are kept
separate (anonymous) from personal physical experience by means of efficient production, you simply
cannot afford to make your own bath matt. Also, textiles that display personal investment are kept
separate from base physical experience. If I so choose (however irresponsibly) to spend my time hooking
a rug, it should be displayed, and appreciated with the higher senses and intellect, and kept at a distance
from animal situations such as naked wet feet. The type of craft I am working with seems to be situated
in a very specific position as a past-time. I would suggest that the products of this handwork are meant to
be viewed as a record of the movements of the body and not as items for the use of the body. In both
practice and product there is a controlled affirmation of existence that is separate from use value. The
affordable and anonymous substitutes are more comfortably suited to serve corporeal duties. The
personal labor of hands is kept at a distance from the danger of bodies, as the reality of bodies is
relegated to the realm of disposable. A dividing line of control is drawn between personal evidence we
are meant to see and that which seeps through the gaps.

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Figure 1: Jess Portfleet Untitled with crutches, 2018

Having cake, eating Things (dualism)

Collecting involves grouping, placing and classifying- forms of not just subordination, but of consideration
and care. As they are gathered, they are also claimed by the collection. As objects are abstracted by
other significances, their subjective value becomes their first identity.
Baudrillard states, in his Subjective Discourse:
For children, the act of collecting is a rudimentary way of mastering the outside world, of arranging,
classifying and manipulating.5
I am interested in collecting as a form of practicing control: control over objects, self-control and control
over social status. It is in this act of collecting, the impulse to impose or codify that makes them objects to
a subject. It also implies an other-ness latent in objects, an unruly quality that they must either possess or
signify, a need to be corralled. Jane Bennet describes this as “thing-power”6, a term she uses to
acknowledge the potential qualities in things that transgress the bounds of their human-centric contexts.
I am interested in how objects can operate as magic mirrors and prosthetic devices, both reflecting and
extending human experience (figure 2). This is not just in the act of ordering the unkempt, but in the
tenderness of gathering, in combining the security of ownership with the possibility of potential.

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Figure 2: Jess Portfleet Untitled part 4 (installation detail) 2017

Souvenir7 is a name we give to objects that act as a physical corroboration of an experience that has a
time and a place. These types of objects lend authenticity, they are metonymic. We develop terminology
to frame specific significances; Commodifying firsts and lasts, celebrating rarity, prizing even
obsolescence. A souvenir does not have the same value the next day as it does after years have passed.
When we name a keepsake, we freeze it as a memento of a moment and place. We ask it to stay put
while we travel on and grow. The trick of the souvenir- of memory in general, is the reunion of that
original moment and the present. It is in the act of attempting to match them together again, to line up
distortions. It is in this bending and realigning that new perspectives become available in the
cracks. Time affords necessary distance to shift something we thought we knew as the need for accuracy
is replaced with the trust of something we can touch in the present. Objects seem to offer physical,
tangible evidence, but this evidence bows to our own personal lens. They are as we see them. Perhaps,
this naming simply serves the desire to invest in objects, and souvenir is an accepted and relatively safe
model (as it arguably has one foot rooted in truth, but whose truth?) of replacing use value with the
subjectivity of the owner. Often these objects are elevated above their functional counterparts as they
are tools of social distinction and aspirations, but his label also provides permission to task objects with
holding emotional content. Souvenir could be a gateway object, one that opens admission of other
possible significances. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze cites Spinoza’s Short Treatise II:
It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies
something of itself in us.8
It is this simple moment of strange reflection that I hope to open up in my work. There exists a blink of
connection when light is shed into parts so withdrawn that they are perceived as separate, but not
completely foreign, players. Using the arm-pit pads from a pair of crutches, I create casts that afford a

5

fragment of recognition- both visual and physical, yet their surface, shift in context, quantity and
arrangement all work to keep them from being fully apprehended (figure 3).

Figure 3: Jess Portfleet Untitled with crutches (installation detail) 2018

The viewer is held in a place near recognition with suspended resolution. These objects aren’t
misrepresented, but left fragmented, they are changed and now offer a partial view. They are accessible,
yet without conclusion that accompanies full understanding or naming. In this space their Thing-hood
makes itself known. Objects offer a physical reflection, dependent and controllable. The term Thing
implies a strangeness, an otherness, a primitive and unscripted physicality. Perhaps there is more to
objects than can be entirely captured by the predictable subject/ object relationship. Object is something
we know and have a place for, Thing includes possibility of other. I know I can’t step outside of this
relationship and that may not even be my desire, but I am curious about the Thing part of objects as
another type of reflection, bent and fugitive.
The pieces I use in installation take advantage of this object dualism by being at once recognizable with
their own logic as well as unresolved and feral. The act of collecting is to create order, to stage control, to
bolster through physical manifestations. Many types of collections have prefigured solutions: stamps,
sports cards, coins and other editions have a specific sequence and number of components, they have a
predicated way of behaving together. This is by definition, effective when you collect objects, but more
compelling when you collect Things.
Shopping as provocation (evidence)

The start of my process is both material and formal. I begin by visually shopping for shapes to crop and
reframe. I use the term shopping intentionally here because I am looking for objects I can claim and take
home to make and remake my own. Tools with specific ergonomics, nesting containers and toys are

6

objects I search for the curves and volume that will become the master for subsequent casts. Toys make
effective starting places because they have already been reloaded with play as their first significance.
Consider a toy hammer; it is functionless for pounding, it only embodies the idea of hammer, distilled and
caricaturized.
Objects that have been cast in iron, plastic or resin are also compelling because they are both common,
and fluent in the language of reproducibility. Artist Jessica Stockholder speaks to the materiality of
everyday objects:
I use material that’s inexpensive, readily available. It’s really a pleasure that we have all this stuff
around us. I love plastic; I think it’s gorgeous, and I love it. All of these objects are full of design and
other people’s thinking, and I ride on the backs of that. I think that my work engages the means of
production that we live with, even while it embodies things from a long time ago.9
The way Stockholder approaches materials points to many ideas I am considering in my practice: the way
her works move between singular objects and installations, the way she incorporates different materials
into one experience, and the way specific cultural hints work with her commitment to formalism. She
works with found objects that are (sometimes) recognizable, save for their everydayness has been
confounded by their arrangements, color, and added materials. Bits of the readymade objects peek
through the work hinting at furniture, home improvement, and consumer culture, but without usurping
the physicality of their combined experience. This flirting with objects that speak to consumption and use,
such as tools, containers, fasteners, building components and so much plastic, grounds the work in
consumer culture, but only enough to open up recognition. Stockholder is less concerned about the
tropes certain types of things offer and more interested in investigating material relationships using what
she calls “stuff”10. One might recognize the plastic pails, but that contextual hint drifts in and out. What
remains is the red tapered cylinders, repeated (figure 4). The way that she disregards how these objects
should be used strips them of their framing and invites in other interpretations. It’s a quiet refusal that
reads as possibility. I am also interested in the way she uses surface treatments to unify these disparate
items, to challenge recognition and draw focus, especially with color. These pieces have been freed from
their original cultural context to then adhere to their own logic. They are convincing, I believe that they
are exactly where they should be, and am left to consider not how but why.
Additionally, these objects are in relationship with people, they keep within the scale of the body, they
are from a world that humans can physically understand. I think this is rich territory for my practice as I
move back and forth between control and disorder.
Flea markets, thrift stores, junk yards and dollar stores all offer a wide range of inexpensive, sometimes
broken items, that can be physically explored and bargained for. This act of searching involves seeking out
places that have not branded their wares with slick packages, places that allow for reimagining through
pawing and digging and gathering. The spaces I look to as starting places are margins, cultural dead zones
that operate with their own value contexts. Scrap yards sell pieces by material and weight, regardless of
how shiny and what brand. Dollar stores operate under the pretense that everything is the same price.

7

Thrift stores often hold bag sales, where anything you can fit in a bag is five dollars. This democratization
of objects makes anything feel possible. By leveling traditional use value, it allows other, more formal
attributes to shine out of context. I search these objects with my body, I carry them around, stage them,
try them out together in an attempt to understand them more fully and coax more out of them.

Figure 4: Jessica Stockholder JS 263 1995 (furniture, red buckets, bread basket, lamp, yellow spool of thread, acrylic paint)

There is something in the cast-off, second class nature of these sources and their piles of offerings, that
invoke the treasure hunt- the time spent searching informs the outcome, allowing for chance invites
intuitive decision making. I know what I am looking for, but mostly, only when I find it. I know when
objects feel right, but I need to have complete physical access to trust that intuition. I could not see
images on a screen and then order objects and have them delivered as a starting place. All of my
attempts to create my own templates skip this looking and feeling, cultural gleaning step. My
experiments with hand modeling, digital imaging and 3D printing have taught me that this first life of the
original is a touchstone for the resultant work. Although I attempt to reset significance in my pieces, I rely
on found objects11 as the starting place for my casting practice (figure 5).

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Figure 5: found objects

Twenty percent glue (fraternize)

Specific objects, usually from refuse, are chosen and then reassigned through casting. Fabric pieces that
offer a promise of security, an imperfect domesticity, a language of time, are staged in relationship to the
ceramic objects. These elements are further connected by drawing, painting and arrangement to each
other and the space. Proximity plays an important role.
The modularity of the materials I am working with allows them to be realized in response to each other
and the spaces they inhabit. I approach the installation with several boxes of materials and make
relationship choices in conversation with the site. The very technical and time-consuming nature of the
processes I use to build the parts of each work, supports their intuitive looseness in installation. The
gestural quality of the temporal elements, affords the other components the ability to connect without
the restrictions of precision. Allowing them to have their own logic in response to the space and each
other further blurs the line of subject/object relationship pushing questions of potential. The philosopher
and writer Graham Harman, a champion of object-oriented ontology, offers that objects have their own
discrete way of perceiving and responding to one another.
(They)…float in a sensual ether. When they interact, they do so only by the means they know
internally but also in relation to the qualities [of the other object] in which they ‘bathe’. In this vein,
objects hold tremendous possibility, they are sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve, and do
not unleash all their energies at once.12

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He suggests that not only will the proximity of these objects to one another effect the way they are
perceived by the viewer, but moreover it shifts the way they respond to each other. I have witnessed
changes in the pieces in installation based on proximity, quantity and placement. I use the term witness
intentionally to describe a phenomenon that is impartially observed. It is pretty exciting for me to
consider that they, the objects, might be informing each other and operating outside of not just my
anticipation, but my perception as well. This presents a provocative slip or release in the concept of
object possession. It is a step towards letting go of some control, letting the objects make some of the
decisions. This speculation shows up in my work in the form of play, in arranging and rearranging the
components of each piece to see what happens. In moments I find object oriented ontology13 a useful
tool, allowing those ideas to suspend some of the accountability that burdens my making.

Figure 6: Jess Portfleet Untitled part 11 (installation detail) 2017

In addition to what these objects give each other, viewers can’t help but ad lib the bridges between them.
Because objects are fugitive until they are understood, it is human to attempt to bring them to rest by
constructing connections, to tame the wilderness, to own the Things. By combing experience and
understanding, we make sense, we subordinate into a predictable system, our own system. The further
the objects seem to drift from one another, the more sense is required to hold them together, the deeper
the search through the internal catalog for binding referents and clues. By putting objects together that
do not follow an immediate linear narrative, I am asking the viewer to conjure part of that stickum.
Gertrude Stein speaks to a similar paratactic use of language in an interview regarding her approach to
Tender Buttons:

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I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and
put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such
thing as putting them together without sense…Any human being putting down words had to make
sense out of them14
Stein recognizes that she cannot keep her words separate and complete just in their individuality, they
always exist in relationship. Any attempt to isolate them only makes space more obvious and their bond
more desperate. It is the gaps between these words, the construction of their together-meaning that
informs my making-in-the-gallery approach. I introduce the objects to each other and build the
installation in response to their interactions, my perception of their interactions (figure 6). Through the
use of play and responsive rearranging, subjective relationships are invested and reinvested in and by
these Things. I view my role as a provocateur of object relations and their participation in human
experience.

Figure 7: Jess Portfleet Chair, Stove, Candle 2017, found objects, acrylic, ceramic

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Modern marvels (gap)

I find myself in junkyards walking the aisles of wrecked vehicles pulling at housings and fluid reservoirs. This
is looking with my hands at objects that are not for retail sale, they have not been shined up for
consumption and individually priced, but remain raw, vulnerable, sticky with oil or transmission fluid. I am
an interloper in this system of wrecked designs all lying dormant with their guts splayed and available. I am
fascinated by the specificity of newer car parts. Their inner workings provide a slick and molded puzzle of
interlocking bits that not only serve specific functions but cradle each other. When the washer fluid tank is
removed, it retains the shape of its placement, making that absence known. It is articulated to fit and
function in the wheel-well, in specific relation (figure 8). Its shape offers a language of installation and
removal. In such a tight system, any break creates a gap. A gap is a space between two things, it only exists
in relationship. Gaps can be physical, but that is not a necessary limitation. A gap is unfinished, it is a
provocation. A gap implies both absence and connection. It is a thing created by implication.
The French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan asserts:
(The Thing) "will always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by
anything else-or, more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else”.15

Figure 8: Jess Portfleet Untitled 4 (installation view) 2017, ceramic, cotton

Removing the part from the vehicle creates a displacement. It moves the object from a place of
belonging to other. Cropping part of the piece for a mold creates another gap. Casting the piece in clay,
gap. Between each incremental shift there is a space. This displacement speaks to an absence of original
context. These gaps do not behave in a line the way a trail of breadcrumbs might, but more like the
spacing between chards from a shattered vase. They branch out in every direction, and although they

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suggest a volume, the original shape is anyone’s fancy. If you were to put that vase back together, it
would not only be altered by the guesswork of your hands, it would now be twenty percent glue,
contaminated by the something else necessary to hold it together.
Lady Mondegreen (interpretation)

All of this fussing about with the material of language is not borne of a need to create catchy titles, or
even to complete this writing. Moreover, I am curious about the potential in the pitfalls of translation. For
example, take the word “fussing” (a term whose phonetics are fortunately in line with its meaning); what
might that word look like if translated into clay, into yarn, oil pastel, into a dance, or a meal? What parts
of the intellectual symbol are retained and which parts are informed by the translator and new medium?
What is the relationship of these renditions to one another or the original signification? What slippage
that occurs in these iterations is not necessarily a failure or betrayal, but the specific mark of each shift.
Instead of omitting language, I have opted to open my perspective to include words in this material game
of telephone. It is the places that don’t match that highlight individual voices. It is the impossibility of
complete fidelity that showcases subjectivity. Interpretation could be seen as an approximation, a kludge
of discourse — in generates something new and specific to each situation. In these approximations there
is possibility of something new being turned up.
There is a specificity in language, a precision that takes on new meanings through shifting context or
misuse. Children play a game where by repeating a word over and over again, signification falls away
revealing the phonetic framework, which then slips off leaving the aural experience and the physical
vocalization. The system of language becomes only a perimeter and any breach of that boundary invites
other sense, or nonsense. This transgression is a game -absurd and playful, but it is also a denial of the
controlling grip of language. This is not unlike the way that I am utilizing the casting process. Multiplicity
asks: can the signification of an object be stressed through repetition such that it becomes saturated and
preassigned meaning sloughs off? Freed from original connections, these spaces may open up to
repopulation in any direction.
Song lyrics are ripe for misinterpretations, they are filled with poetic liberties, emotional intonations,
regional accents and a host of other stylistic choices. It goes without saying that decisions are made
outside of concern for fidelity to any one vocabulary. These complications do not keep listeners from
signing along, and muddy lyrics become possibilities for interpretation. Personal subjectivities present
themselves in this experience of guessing and mumbling along with the music. Shower-singers are willing
to fill-in and overwrite, in order to make their own sense in accordance with personal logic. This is the
backbone of any adhocism, it speaks to what is available as much to what is needed. In this case,
personal histories define available interpretations. I bring this analogy in because the popular and low
risk of fumbling song lyrics showcases unedited translations of perceptions that have not been filtered
through the intellect or ego. It is the opportunity for this confident rounding-up, this playful guess-work,
that I hope to create in my arrangements.

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Kid wealth (naiveté)

Object value is a human construct, a physical manifestation of a connection to a larger idea. Riches can
be represented through quantity, with abundance and scarcity on either end of the spectrum. Bounty is
connected to security and support, to the ideas of having enough and never running out. Quantity
suggests potential, there is always another opportunity- always more, but it can also describe past
experience. There are objects we can’t let go simply because we have not yet done so, accumulation of
shared history creates responsibility. So many days together builds and changes experience. Wealth can
also be constructed through singularity; the impossibility of reproduction defines objects as irreplaceable
and limited. Unique objects conjure importance in their finality. Although in seeming opposition, both of
these concepts operate as mirrors for human experience. They are subject to the push and pull a basic
need for acceptance and security and the desire for importance and individuality.
Value is often associated with money, maybe because dollars offer a contained system, quantifying what
might otherwise be impossibly varied. My work seeks out and showcases objects as they operate outside
of this dollar system, and their direction of departure. What monetary value is there the hint of an old
fluid reservoir, a broken headlight, a railroad tie bracket, or an empty Tic-Tac container? These are not
expensive objects or prized for their singularity. By not just removing these items from the system they
originally operate in, but recasting them in their own, I reset their value potential by confounding their
cultural label. How do we experience value before we get swept up in the dominating structure of money
and ownership? Can these objects be emotionally reconfigured and recycled? What are the functions of
value that are not predicated by the subject/object relationship lead by a system whose measure is
vanity? Perhaps instead of needing more objects, we desire more ways of knowing objects?
The rubric for assigning meaning is flooded with moving parts, unfixed and relational. Perhaps instead of
needing more objects, we desire more ways of knowing objects? It would be impossible to detail all
outcomes, significance drifts around in a perpetual game of “if this, then that”. My employment of
objects that refuse this naming is more than the classic prince and the pauper trick, it is a way of
reknowing by first unknowing. It offers permission to consider these objects individually, physically, and
in relation to each other and our experience.
Haim Steinbach is an artist whose work is also interested in the malleability of value. In his Shelf works,
the construction and arrangement of the display are a primary focus (figure 9). Steinbach positions and
contains objects on different iterations of the shelf as a display of the complicated constructs of personal
and cultural identity. He exploits the social structures that support these object value systems through a
refusal or a leveling. He questions hierarchies by placing disparate objects together on the same shelf.
This move could be seen as a more sophisticated thrift store bag sale, where the significance of the
subjective system falls away and is replaced by something democratic. In order to accomplish this
tension, Steinbach asks the viewer to consider what these objects are in relationship to each other, but
first, the viewer must figure out what the objects are in relationship to themselves. The viewer is forced
to confront how they identify with objects and the markets that support them.

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Figure 9: Haim Steinbach ultra red #2, 1986

Plucking objects from their place in the system, is one way to open them up to subjective ways of valuing,
but removing the system from the objects might allow them to be experienced even more freely. Bennet
describes this potential as a “before knowing”.
My primary goal has been to give expression to thing-power... My contention is that this peculiar
dimension persists even inside the ubiquitous framing of human thought and perception. I have also
suggested that a playful, naive stance toward nonhuman things is a way for us to render more
manifest a fugitive dimension of experience.16
Her playful stance invites experience of things outside of how they are conventionally catalogued by
collective experience.
Steinbach and Bennet are both interested in the power of objects, but come at the relationship from very
different sides. While Steinbach suggests human connections with objects are a product of a learned
desire for physical reflections of what we perceive as our identity, Bennet is focused more on the
unlimited possibilities that things might offer without foreclosing the relationship. The dividing line seems
to be the idea of possession, with Steinbach asking the viewer to question the validity and structure of
their predetermined and dominate relationships with objects and Bennet wondering what might happen
if we throw out preconceptions and just allow things (to be).

15

Hours of my childhood were spent lugging things around, a thermos filled with pleasing stones, a
backpack with horse chestnuts carefully selected and sorted, popsicle sticks and pine needles tucked into
tiny zippered pockets. I learned though experiencing them, coding their attributes and arranging them in
accordance to our together rationale. The burden of their weight told me I was rich, with each step the
chestnuts rattled against my metal lunch box proclaiming my wealth, my security, my belonging. I was
not alone, and as I struggled to make sense of my power in the physical world around me, my chestnuts,
flattened leaves, river rocks and popsicle sticks became allies. I build my own team from objects I care for
with a logic we develop together. They participate both as a physical reflection of my human-ness and
with their own strange other-ness. My ownership and consideration for them creates significance that
usurps their tree-seed being while part of their alien biology informs my concept of self. Freud describes
this doubling in his 1919 essay:
... the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself
with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his
own—in other words, by doubling,
di-viding and interchanging the self.17
There is a moment of consideration where there is a dissolution of the boundary between self and other,
where the chestnut shines back human qualities to inner chestnut-ness. The objects act as surrogates
and prosthetics. Once these connections are discovered, awareness heightens to anticipate and even
promote, further such connections until the world is filled with mirrors and doors.

Figure 10: Jess Portfleet Untitled part 3, 4, 7, 11 and 2 (installation view) 2017

16

My relationship to objects straddles this line in the sand. On one hand I align with Steinbach, these
chestnuts are mine, they are currency, physical security, booty, they lift me up because they are under
me, I use them as an echolocation device to determine where I fit in. Conversely, they are also Bennet’s
possibility, unknown. Because they are not acknowledged by the main socio-economic value system, their
potential is limitless. They are primarily as I perceive, and I have not drawn boundaries around them. I
am excited to see what else they might (offer, give, provoke, do, need) be. I see this duality operating
most strongly in the presentation of the work. In some arrangements objects are bound, held in reserve,
stockpiled, while other installations appear more as congregations than collections (figure 10). Some
installations utilize known furniture, but challenge the traditional human centric way in which it functions
(figure 11).

Figure 11: Jess Portfleet Untitled with crutches, 2018

17

Words make different things (riddles)

Words are signifiers for images which are signifiers for things for which there are no words. Indeed, a
picture is worth a thousand words; But is that exhaustive, and which thousand and to whom? Language
involves translating perceptions into an ordered system, it requires intellectual digestion. In the rawest
human moments, vocal communication strips down to emotional noise, we are at a loss for words
because finding them requires stepping into the system. Recognition cannot be contained, it is something
that happens everywhere and all at once. Objects say lots of things that bypass the structure of language.
Words, labels and classification risk anchoring the work and announcing it as one thing, or at least a
participant in an order. As the writer Malcom Gladwell suggests:
We all have an instinctive memory for faces. But by forcing you to verbalize that memory — to
explain yourself — I separate you from those instincts.18
My recent work occupies a fragile space that could easily be stunted by explanation. The grounding
nature of description and definition act as a bright light that scares away any shadows that foster
subjective (mis)interpretations. Intuition is personal, it feels innate. Too much information overcooks
what is already known.
Historically, I’ve side-stepped this potential thunder-stealing by keeping my work untitled or using noninformative numerics for reference. I have been reluctant to write directly about my work because words
feel permanent, they substantiate, they imply a one truth that never feels satisfactory. I could spend
several thousand words trying to reveal something easily understood with the body, to find that in the
end I have mostly succeeded in explaining it away. Perhaps it is more useful to work with the failures of
language rather than attempting to apprehend all there is to know through writing.
I look to the way Haim Steinbach uses plain language in his Untitled pieces. By labeling what the work
simply physically is, Steinbach not only refuses to over direct the viewer, but the strongest provocation of
the work is left intentionally unspoken. The terms he chooses to classify each component in the Untitled
works are direct and accurate, but incomplete. They offer only a fragment of information, a partial view
from one side. Consider Untitled (rabbit, sailor), the labels rabbit and sailor are not incorrect, but in
choosing these, Steinbach steps over the obvious and loaded, instead settling on limited and simplified
(figure 11). The Stay Puft marshmallow man is inarguably a sailor, but only someone outside of the
cultural system in which he operates would find that label useful. By highlighting this accessory element
in the title, Steinbach further flattens the collective/individual value system this piece is already troubling.

18

Figure 12: Haim Steinbach, Untitled (rabbit, sailor) 2015

In relation to my recent work, I have been examining structures of language that use their directness to
complicate rather than explain. I am drawn to paratactic style, to limericks19 and riddles, to prose so bare
it obfuscates with obviousness. The structure of riddles and limericks are especially compelling as it
connects to the way I install the work in a space. Both are built of clues that operate individually but work
in relationship through phonetics, rhyming, and rhythm, each offering a glimpse or partial uncovering of
the whole. With each hint, the reader moves closer to an understanding, which can only be completely
experienced with all parts considered together. There is a teasing in this slow reveal that often concludes
in a twist of language and resultant paradigm shift.
Haunted house (unsettled)

These casts are made of clay which is poured into the mold as liquid, then freed from the plaster as
vulnerable and malleable, and finally fired into permanence. The soft handling of clay yields to both the
exact edges of the molds as well as the touch of my hand. It both records and serves as a record.
Additional production marks such as seams and pour spurs are left or smoothed by my fingers, both clues
of process, hints at replication.
The results of slipcasting are hollow forms that serve both as an edition and as individual objects
themselves, both type and token. They are stand-ins, they are place-holders, props, they are an outline,
they hold a shape in space. They are also an army, an accumulation, a pile of leaves, an obsession,
abundance. Casting offers a repeatable print of just the surface, ethereal, recognizable, empty. This idea
of imprinting or echoing is furthered by multiplication.

19

Consider footprints on the beach as distortion of space by the walker. Their multiplicity alludes to time,
an overlapping accumulation more than a progression. Could this repetition also be fingernail trimmings
or the worn-down blade of a kitchen knife? These marks of process offer an incomplete and fractured
glimpse of the processes of the body, but not the body itself. Their multiplicity offers a distorted
reverberation one step out of synch, a misregistration, another gap. Bending the perspective to reflect
one-half click off center opens the space between anticipated knowing and other. The point of the pieces
is not to figure them out, but the heightened awareness that comes from examining the gaps. It is not to
answer and know, but a path to another perspective.

Figure 13: Jess Portfleet untitled part 3 (installation detail) 2017, ceramic, cotton jersey

The absence of the interior of the cast is also a vacancy. It suggests a possible return, a housing, a husk, a
container. Not only does casting create an actual shell, but it fragments and abstracts the original,
touching the unnamable space before recognition by shifting materiality. This displacement removes the
mask of familiarity and exposes attributes that may go unnoticed in context.
In the routine of daily life, perception perpetually forecloses sensuous experience in order to render
the physical world phenomenal (which means to render it habitable). The difference between the
apperceptive constitution of the thing, in what we might call its objecthood, and the experience of
the thing in what we might call its thinghood, emerges in the moment (and no doubt, only as a
moment) of re-objectification that results from a kind of misuse- turning the picture bottom up,
standing on one’s head. We might materialize the world around us through habit, but only the
interruption of habit will call our attention to brute physicality.20
Might material misrepresentation serve as misuse in this idea? Recasting pieces of metal and plastic in
ceramic displaces their first identity in order to lay bare their physicality and open them up to new

20

significance, or another significance. I’ve removed the plastic washer fluid reservoir from a vehicle and
cast it in clay, over and over. The surfaces are opaque, showcasing clay and ceramic processes (figure 12).
With function or use-value shifted, these objects are not free from, but now opened up to other
interpretations and investment. They are familiar, but not recognizable, domestic but irrational.
Perhaps they are specters of familiar objects.
Ghosts are compelling because they are a continuation, a living on, a bending of something once known.
They are an unfinished hallucination. Through transformation, they are unbound from the systems that
govern the mortal world and gifted abilities that render them personally potent. They transcend time,
gravity, and other rational boundaries. Haunting21 could be described as an illogical treatment of that
which is deeply personal, the loss of control over that which you thought you conducted. The power of
this fiction is only limited, and also directed, by the imagination of the obsessed. The difference between
the repetition of haunting and that of habituation is defined by control (the perception of safety). Ghosts
invite a breach of emotional etiquette by exploiting boundaries. In their nebulousness, they provide a
space and a shape for entertaining the unresolved and unsettling.

Figure 14: Jess Portfleet Untitled 7 (installation detail) 2017, chair, acrylic, ceramic

Although the ideas that complicate, devotion, dualism, evidence, fraternize, gap, interpretation, naiveté,
riddles, and unsettle each offer are partial and specific views of my practice, this list is not intended to be
exhaustive. It is in the linkages22 between these ideas, what connects and separates them, that keeps me

21

engaged in the process. This list could be seen as a narrative with pieces missing, a truth filled with
vacancies. It is a detailed and ordered structure that could reflect any fancy of kinship. In this case the
unspoken heading is: “what I am able to share about my practice”.
The preface to Foucault’s Order of Things makes clear how subjectivity builds not only what we know, but
what we can know, in the form of how. It exposes the concept that there is always a system, a method, an
organization, as well as the limits/limitlessness of correlations. He references Borge’s description of a
“certain Chinese encyclopedia”23 whose absurdity puts on display not only the failure of language to
describe completely, but its triumph of aligning otherwise impossible worlds. It is a list that collapses the
boundaries between what is known intellectually, experienced physically, and that which cannot be
known. Possibility resides in the parts that are left incomplete, in the leaps required to flatten those gaps.
In my practice this shows up in playing in and out of order, the dance around recognition, value and
identity, and the possibility of other potentials in objects. Each of these ideas describe fluid relationships
humans have with objects. Each offer situations that support playful and unfixed significances that
participate in the continuous feedback loop we have with Things.
Work as work (verdict)

Each day of the installation as well as the exhibition, I would look at the work and consider how it was
operating, and then determine if I felt things needed to be (re)moved. Throughout the MFA exhibition I
received questions about audience response, especially with regards to (s)pacing, orientation and
proximity. How was this shifting and rearranging caring for the viewer’s experience? Was it fair to move
the work around the space, to swap the pieces included in the installation? There are precedents for
progressive installations, pieces that move with the space under certain criteria, but usually a set of
constraints is identified as part integral to the content of the work. In this case, the shifts carried only the
broad content of exploration as driven by the artist. Was this self-indulgent, a learning process, a
vulnerability?

22

Figure 15: Jess Portfleet details from iterations of Nonagon exhibition, 2018

I arranged and rearranged in response to the space, and the other pieces in the gallery and around thembut also in response to what the work wants24- or the logic that these pieces build together (figure 14).
For me this installation process is very much a process. It involves editing and physically rearranging,
differentiating between individual objects, compositions and the installation as a whole. I am not sure it
will ever be complete- much of the troubling place in my practice is in this practice, there always feels like
more these objects could show me and each other. I find kinship in the description of artist Geoffrey
Farmer who is known to consider installations as works in progress, even after they have opened to the
public. In an interview with Sky Godden in 2012, he states:
The work is work, which is to say, a process… I like the possibility of rearrangement, reassessment,
another chance.25

23

These endless reveals are drawn out by provoking relationships and continued responsive play26.
Connections of materials, shapes, colors, proximity, posture, texture are starting places for these
investigations. What does ceramic have to say to wool or plaster or concrete and how can those discreet
languages be cultivated in a gallery space filled with pillars and ledges (figure 15) and animated signage?
Where is the balance of order and disorder that allows the pieces to breathe both on their own and as a
collective?

Figure 16: Jess Portfleet Untitled with bridges, 2018

It seemed that the overwhelming reception of the work shown in the MFA installation was centered
around a commentary on how the space was used, sidestepping description of and response to, the
physicality of the work itself. I have to admit that I was challenged not only by this conversation, but to
have any other type of conversation at all. Many of the individual pieces that felt provocative in the studio
(figure 16), became too singular or resolved in the gallery context. Compositions I had carefully detailed
became overwhelmed in the real space of installation. The focus turned from nuanced relationships to
crowd control. It was hard not to respond to this seeming shift in ambition27 as a failure initially, and as a
result of the strength of the feedback I received surrounding the placement of the objects, there were
several attempts to open the installation up, to make it feel less designed, to better obey the Happy
Hour’s Command28.

24

Figure 17: Jess Portfleet Play-doh gallery mock up #3, 2018

This consideration came to a sharp point for me during the de-install. I organized the removal of my
objects by loose order of size and related packing materials. As components began to leave the
installation in somewhat arbitrary droves, I noticed the compositions shifting not only in their singularity,
but in their ability to relate to one another. The whole space opened up. It took random removal to reach
new relationships between the objects. This moment came as bittersweet punctuation. It had been
strongly suggested, more than once, that I remove some of the pieces in the installation to make room
for the others to interact. Although I embraced this thinking, I was not able to successfully take much of
the work out. I viewed all of the pieces in relation to one another and was both consciously and
unconsciously very committed to those interactions. I would remove several pieces only to replace them
with other works that filled their gaps. The installation was not changing density, only shape. It required
me to lift consideration of any audience (including myself), to really see the components anew
individually as well as together in the space.

Figure 18: Jess Portfleet Untitled with carpet (detail), 2018

25

Incidentally, several of the objects from this installation walked off with admirers (six of the ceramic
pieces shown in figure 17). If I hadn’t been with these pieces checking on them, moving them around,
tucking them in, I may not have noticed their absence. This provoked two additional realizations 1) if
specific attention is required to notice small removals, what else could be taken before the pieces
lost/changed their integrity? 2) some viewers were willing to risk stepping outside of the social norms in a
gallery setting to remove components of the installation. Were they inspired by a need for
ownership/possession, a desire to interact physically, the taboo and elicit value of touching and taking?
Although I could not have predicted these results, I am excited to further explore possible physical
interactions between the viewer and the work, especially as they relate to shifting space and perceived
value.

1

Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Clarendon Press, 2013.
Gell claims to eschew semiotics because he identifies it with language and language with signification,
which is of little use for understanding things because it makes no space for the qualities of the objects
themselves. He states “We talk about art objects using signs, but art objects are not, except in special
cases, signs themselves…” (Gell 6)
2

Ian Bogost coins the term Latour Litany to describe lists of things as they occur in writing primarily as
oblique metaphorical devices. Bogost created a Latour Litanizer which is a philosophical tool and internet
gadget that uses Wikipedia to generate random lists of things and places them next to each other. It can
be found on his website.
Latour Litanizer. (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://bogost.com/
Another prominent thinker in Object Oriented Ontology, Graham Harman, adopts this term and further
describes its value to establish the autonomous force and personality of individual actors, rather than
allowing them to be reduced to or swallowed up by some supposedly grand principle or structure. In the
case of this writing, the list or litany is used to allow the sections to remain individual yet rub up against
one another without falling victim to the summing of common framing devices.
Larval Subjects. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://larval-subjects.blogspot.com/
3

Stockholder, Jessica. Art and Labor. jessicastockholder.info/projects/writing/art-and-labor/.

4

Schwenger looks to Heidegger’s definition of “world” as described by the systems humans build around
themselves. He uses the term “domestication” interchangeably with this concept of world.
Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. University of Minnesota Press,
2006.

26

5

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New Delhi: Navayana, 2008. Print.

6

Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things.” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 347–372.,
Bennet defines things as “entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set
them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics”. She coins the term “thing-power” as an
“acknowledgment, respect, and sometimes fear of the materiality of the thing and to articulate ways in
which human being and thinghood overlap”. (Bennet 349-351)
7

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke
University Press. 1993.
8

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy . San Francisco: City Lights , 2007. Print.

9

“Tag Archives: Jessica Stockholder.” Art21 Magazine, magazine.art21.org/tag/jessica-stockholder/.
“I do a lot of shopping at Home Depot. I don’t know how much I want to give credit to all those different
big conglomerates, but stuff is cheap and easy to buy, and I participate in that. I use material that’s
inexpensive, readily available.”
This quote was pulled from an interview conducted in 2005. I would suggest that 13 years later, the crisis
of disposable plastics is embedded in the use of these materials in a way that reads differently than it may
have when they were originally employed. Stockholder states that she “loves plastic”, which is a
disturbing and provocative announcement. It is something so many North Americans say freely with their
wallets, but are culturally almost forced to deny. As the push and pull of immediately available, yet
irresponsible, becomes a stronger social voice, it arguably shifts the content of this work.
10

“Jessica Stockholder.” Art21, art21.org/artist/jessica-stockholder/.
“I use castoff things and new, bright, and shiny things. My work is not about a particular kind of object so
much as it’s about stuff in general. I’m not interested in having the work be caught in one kind of stuff.”
11

In his 2005 text, Mitchell best defines found objects by what they are not, ie : “the sought object, the
aesthetic, desired, valued, symbolic, hated, or lost object”
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images. Univ. of Chicago Press,
2010.
12

Harman, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Theory Redux) (Kindle Locations 180-182).
Wiley. Kindle Edition.
13

As defined by Ian Bogost: “Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology
(“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special
status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for
example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits

27

(scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a
path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and
pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.”
What is OOO? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://bogost.com/
14

Stein, Gertrude. "A Transatlantic Interview, 1946," A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude
Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, 1971), p. 18
15

Schwenger, Peter. “Words and the Murder of the Thing.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 99–
113., doi:10.1086/449034.
16

Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things.” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 347–372.

17

Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

18

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Back Bay Books, 2013.

19

Who becomes droll
While shifting control
Collecting objects
Revealing abjects
Hello rabbithole

20

Brown, Bill. A sense of things: the object matter of American literature. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007.

21

Linn, H. J., Adams, T. E., & Ellis, C. (2016). Handbook of autoethnography: Glossary of Haunting. London:
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
22

Maleuvre, Didier. A Cabinet of Curiosities: Encyclopedism and the Collection in the Nineteenth-Century
French Novel. 1993.
“The paradoxical nature of linkages is that it is built on the singular link, the puzzling moment of nonidentity which gives identity to what it holds together.” (296 )This idea of overlap usurping identity is
important to both the organization of the pieces and to the potential dissolution of boundaries between
the viewer and the objects.
23

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge, 2002.
“I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the
stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which
we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to
disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.”

28

So begins the preface of Foucault’s text as he describes how the impossibilities of cataloguing- or full
knowing are demonstrated through the employment of very specific and seemingly arbitrary categories
arranged outside of consideration of their informing one another. He continues “In the wonderment of
this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is
demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark
impossibility of thinking that.” (xv)
24

I see these shifts as descriptive of possibility rather than mobility and guard against making the work
seem anthropomorphic outright. I am not anti-anthropomorphic, but prefer the democracy of nonanthropomorphic.
25

Tate. (n.d.). Who is Geoffrey Farmer? Retrieved August 08, 2018, from
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/geoffrey-farmer-10350/who-is-geoffrey-farmer
26

The use of the word ‘play’ here is to describe process that is necessarily open-ended and unresolved.
Jessica Stockholder describes it as a kind of learning in a 2005 segment of Art21 entitled Play “Kids’ play
is a kind of learning and thinking that doesn’t have a predetermined end. I think I’m involved in that.”
Play. (n.d.). Retrieved August 12, 2018, from http://www.pbs.org/art21/episodes/season-3-2005/play/
27

Upon further reflection and subsequent edits to this writing, I am unsure of the use of the word
‘ambition’ in this sense. It does seem that I have quite an investment in the spaces between and that
which surrounds the physical objects themselves. This persistent discussion may have been perceived as
off-target only in my inability to read past the suggestions that I remove some of the work. I have elected
to leave this statement in tact as it points to continued questions of space and concepts of success.
28

In his entry The Happy Hour’s Command, Whitman describes not only the immediate impulse
(described by the title) to create without concern for completeness or polished final product, but also the
potential joy and indulgence of its open ended reception: “—to go home, untie the bundle, reel out
diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into printpages, and let the mélange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves.” He continues:
“Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary
book ever printed.”
Whitman, W. (2016). Specimen days & collect. Milton Keynes: Wentworth Press.

29

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Jess Portfleet, Untitled with crutches, 2018

4

Figure 2: Jess Portfleet, Untitled part 4 (installation detail) 2017

5

Figure 3: Jess Portfleet, Untitled with crutches (installation detail) 2018

6

Figure 4: Jessica Stockholder, JS 263 1995

8

Figure 5: found objects

9

Figure 6: Jess Portfleet Untitled part 11 (installation detail) 2017

10

Figure 7: Jess Portfleet, Chair, Stove, Candle 2017

11

Figure 8: Jess Portfleet, Untitled 4 (installation view) 2017, ceramic

12

Figure 9: Haim Steinbach, ultra red #2, 1986

15

Figure 10: Jess Portfleet, Untitled part 3, 4, 7, 11 and 2 (installation view) 2017

16

Figure 11: Jess Portfleet Untitled with crutches, 2018

17

Figure 12: Haim Steinbach, Untitled (rabbit, sailor) 2015

19

Figure 13: Jess Portfleet, untitled part 3 (installation detail) 2017

20

Figure 14: Jess Portfleet, Untitled 7 (installation detail) 2017

21

Figure 15: Jess Portfleet, details from iterations of Nonagon exhibition, 2018

23

Figure 16: Jess Portfleet, Untitled with bridges, 2018

24

Figure 17: Jess Portfleet, Play-doh gallery mock up #3, 2018

25

Figure 18: Jess Portfleet, Untitled with carpet (detail), 2018

25

30