Jessica Stockholder
October 31 - December 13, 2025 | Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
A knot is a line turned back on itself. A two-dimensional gesture becomes a spatial configuration, perhaps even unfolding temporally as we follow its arc from beginning to end. Whether formed by hand or through circumstance, a knot interrupts the flow to hold materials together through tension. Making use of lines, knots, and tangles, artworks by Jessica Stockholder and Eli Bornowsky draw connections across symbolic and material realities, tracing the entanglements through which perception takes shape.
The artists’ overlapping tactics of ‘picture-making’ give both practices a metonymic quality. Whereas metaphor operates through resemblance—one thing standing in for another—metonymy depends on adjacency and material connection. Stockholder literally draws lines across what we call nature and society, each hooked terminus acting as an anchor that clasps nearby objects in a continuous chain. Bruised Elbow (2025) features elemental copper and an amputated tree limb aligned with a plastic food tray. What do they have in common but everything? The tree evokes nature, yet this tree was cultivated, replanted among others to replenish clearcut tracts, while plastic has become ubiquitous within so-called nature. Her practice insists that there is no raw material from which to construct—only matter already shaped by culture, industry, and environmental pressures. Bornowsky’s work asks similar questions, to different effect. How can we conceive of infinity from within our decidedly finite perspective and existence? The procedurally-coloured, aperiodic patterns that comprise his work are subject to multi-stability—which is the optical condition of having several likenesses at once. For Bornowsky, multi-stability is universality, the common denominator of dissimilar perspectives is their difference and their ongoing interpretability. In this way, both artists’ works entangle the viewer, drawing us into a chain of causality that unfolds in simultaneously material and symbolic dimensions.