The Most Fragile Blossom
Jessica Stoller at PPOW Gallery
The ceramicist and mistress of porcelain Jessica Stoller is only 38 years old, which might come as a shock when you consider the extreme deftness with which she is able to manipulate her chosen material, but her age might also explain her overindulgence in the use of the female breast as a motif. (Since you’re asking, I don’t think that stand alone representations of breasts are art—no matter whether a man or woman makes them, no matter the medium. To me they’re not much more than essentialized Instagram like-bait, a pink millennial pitfall.)
Breasts, yes, but these I approve of.
In this show of her works at PPOW Gallery (on view until February 15th), other pieces of Stoller’s work are more complex, but still a little too sound bitey for my taste. (For example, one bust, with its back to the gallery’s entrance, sports thick gray hair. In circling to its front, however, you are greeted by the gaping eyes of a skull, in what feels a little too Norman Bates-y to be a profound meditation on female aging.) There are, however, more than twenty elaborate works on display here, and many are quite capable of nuance.
Most successful, I think, was a small piece sitting on a plinth in the back gallery (and a good reason to proceed through this show slowly, so as not to miss its details), the artist’s take on the myth of Daphne, in which the nymph transforms into a tree in order to escape the god Apollo’s advances. This work is not only beautiful in the fine detail of body becoming branch and vine (it’s impossible not to be impressed by an artist’s ability to work with so delicate a material), but is perhaps a summation of the show’s ethos. The fact that the god is so clearly absent (as compared to, say, Bernini’s interpretation of the same myth) is a clue to what this show is about. This Daphne does not need Apollo for her destruction.
As women of the 21st century, we have agency to destroy ourselves, to let ourselves be duped by the prevailing myths of our bodies, our sexuality, and our value. I will admit I myself was often repelled by the many labial renderings in the show—the fleshy folds and wrinkles of female sex organs—evidence of how important it is to normalize these images. But we also have the power to change that (and here perhaps is where Instagram does come in, if only it would allow for such images to be shown on its platform).
I loved, for this same reason, the wrinkled skin framed by floral wreaths, which made texture of porcelain’s impossibly smooth surface and added glint to skin dulled by old age. That these works looked like upholstery recast sagging skin as eminently touchable, a thing of softness, and therefore of attraction and desire.
Flowers are frequent in this show, a nod to traditions of the material, but also exist as representatives of vanity as an artistic tradition, a reminder of the fragility of beauty and youth. (Look closely at the largest display of flowers in the second gallery and you’ll find a rafflesia, a flower which attracts its pollinators with its stench of rotting flesh.)
But it is the flowers that drive the point home: beauty is delicate, yes, and youth is fleeting: these works could be destroyed by any careless visitor.
This show might undermine itself by making its point, as it seems to say that if only we would place value in something longer lasting (something that (notably) does not appear in the show) we could be invincible.
PPOW Gallery
Until February 15