JACKIE BROOKNER

SITTING PRETTY

January 22 - March 20, 2024

While postmodernist thinkers have successfully problematized our assumptions about how we know, what we know, and who we are, telling us that language determines them all, humanity has been insistently placing its own existence, as well as that of the rest of life on Earth, in dire jeopardy—poisoning water, land and air. Postmodernism’s deconstruction of the autonomy of the individual and its breakdown of the borders of the subject are consistent with the awareness ecology brings to us that our human actions have effects far beyond our intentions and desires and that our dreams of technological control are fantasy.

—Jackie Brookner from ‘The Heart of Matter,’ Art JournalSummer 1992

On January 22, 2024, Marisa Newman Projects is honored to present a suite of chairs made by the late American ecologist Jackie Brookner. In 1992, at a pivotal moment when her art practice was called into question by her own writing which at the time began to focus on how “our materialistic culture could be so at war with the matrix of its own matter: the Earth.” Using soil as a metaphor for the planet, she made the chairs as a way to investigate the cultural associations of dirt, excrement, sex, and death. This exploration would ultimately shift her practice from the studio to the outside world where she would go on to create landscape-scale™Biosculptures that continue to provide ecological benefits and transform cultural values in locations around the globe where they are still in operation today. Brookner considered the earth and its resources in everything she created. The human body and its functional parts; head, legs, hands, feet were recurring forms in her sculptures, and the tongue, the fleshy muscular organ in the mouth of mammals, used for tasting, licking, swallowing, and [in humans] for articulating speech. She began to sculpt with dirt in the same way she once used clay to work out ideas and together with the malleable qualities of the tongue—moist, rough, silken—she created the chairs indifferent shapes of articulation. They are seductive, playful, gritty, surreal and an invitation to sit, relax and experience the comfort of being at one with the Earth.

Jackie Brookner was a celebrated ecological artist, sculptor, educator, and prolific writer on subjects at the intersection of language, ecology, human nature, and our connection to the natural world. She is the recipient of numerous awards including The National Endowment for the Arts, The New YorkFoundation for the Arts in Sculpture, Drawing, and Interdisciplinary Work, The Nancy Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, New School University Pedagogical Innovation Grant, andNational Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” Grant for The Fargo Project,Fargo, ND [ongoing]. She completed her B.A. at Wellesley College and holds M.A. and A.B.D. degrees from Harvard University.

Gallery Hours:

Monday - Wednesday, 1-6 pm or by appointments

For more info, email contact@marisanewman.com