Alongside Seeing Red, Stoller’s more intimately scaled freestanding and wall-based works seduce with their soft pastel colors and tactile sensuosity before revealing a more menacing edge. Masterfully sculpting crones, skeletons, medusas, and other supernatural forms, Stoller explores the repeated pathologization of the female body. One such work, Multiply, 2024, depicts a skeletal figure evoking an Auricular Style. Channeling the eerie effect of this 17th century Dutch ornamentation based on human anatomy, Stoller’s Multiply strikes a fervent stance atop a bulbous, fleshy protuberance oozing out from its core. Taken together, the works in Split suggest that, as philosopher and gender theorist Christine Battersby writes, “the experience of the female human in our culture has direct links with the anomalous, the monstrous, the inconsistent, and the paradoxical - in such a way that allows for a recontextualization or an opening up of embodied identity.”[ii]

[i] July, Miranda. All Fours. Penguin, May 2024.
[ii] Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998. Print.

Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) lives and works in West New York, NJ. She received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France; Brigitte Mulholland, Paris, France; Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY; Perrotin, Paris, France; Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; Foundation Bernardaud, Limoges, France; and Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; among others. She has had solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Hionas Gallery, New York, NY; and The Clay Studio, PA. A 2023 New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, 2016 Pollock-Krasner grantee, 2013 Peter S. Reed grantee, and 2013 Louis C. Tiffany nominee, Stoller has also participated in residencies such as the Museum of Arts and Design’s Artist Studios Program, the Kohler Arts & Industry Program, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace Program, among others.