Painting in Dimension: Abstraction, Representation, and Collage
with Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Jennifer Rochlin
$175 lab fee | June 14–27 | Exploratory
This course investigates painting as a spatial and dimensional practice. Participants will examine the interplay between abstraction and representation while extending painting into relief and three-dimensional form. Collage serves as both source material and conceptual framework—borrowing images and ideas from the world, disrupting dominant narratives, and constructing new meanings through layering and juxtaposition. Through a series of projects, participants will move between surface and structure, exploring how cutting, assembling, and building can transform the painted image into sculptural space. The course emphasizes experimentation, material exploration, and critical dialogue, offering students the opportunity to expand their understanding of what painting can be. We will discuss paintings that have been made in the expanded field, considering color, line, composition, form, beauty, and content beyond traditional painting materials. We will take inspiration from artists who have experimented with unexpected materials, whose pieces have stretched onto the wall, and use three dimensional forms. We will look at the work of Ann Truitt, Michalene Thomas, Cady Noland, Rachel Harrison, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Cauleen Smith, among others. Likewise, we will glean inspiration from artists who have used collage to rupture methods of looking, including Hannah Wilke, Jess, Frida Orupabo, Wangechi Mutu and the films of Robert Bresson. Assignments will prompt participants to explore where meaning emerges in their work—through materials, imagery, and personal connection. Participants will bring personal items, forage for materials across the Ox-Bow landscape, and build a sculpture or relief using paper-mâché, cardboard, and wire as foundational structures for painting. To quickly generate energy and begin thinking through form, students will create four to six collages during the first few days. Following a mid-session critique, participants will develop a final project consisting of two to three experimental, sculptural paintings that integrate their discoveries in material, process, and meaning.
SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 607 001.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (she/her) produces sculptural installations, assemblages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics that often transform everyday household objects. She has had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design, OH; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace; and the Whitney Biennial. Her work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, OR. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jennifer Rochlin (she/her) trained as a painter and took up ceramics as a way to expand her painting practice into three dimensions. She uses terra-cotta clay to hand-build vessels in coil and slab methods, creating familiar forms that echo the long history of ceramics. Undulating with dents and bulges, Rochlin’s vessels reject direct homage, however, in favor of suggesting the unpredictable, beautiful variance of human bodies. Her brushy, expressive gestures in underglaze and glaze reside both comfortably alongside and in contrast to the sgraffito drawing method she also employs. Rochlin’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues including Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, WI; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Gamble House, Pasadena, CA; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA; Deitch, New York; Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York; and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago. The recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Belle Foundation and the Durfee Foundation ARC Grant, she has had solo exhibitions at galleries including Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Paris; Shrine, New York; The Pit, Los Angeles; Maki Gallery, Tokyo; and Lefebvre & Fils, Paris. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. She holds a BA from the University of Colorado Boulder and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she participated in an exchange at the Universität der Künste Berlin.