Jill Levine | Changing Planes

High Noon is pleased to present Changing Planes, a new body of mixed media wall sculptures by Jill Levine. In Levine’s third show with the gallery, her idiosyncratic forms built of styrofoam, plaster-dipped gauze, and modeling compound have obtained a new biomorphic language, implying a modular capability within the sculptures’ structural framework which seems to open like an origami fortune teller. Over several decades, the imagery painted on Levine’s sculptures has moved from sincere imitation to multi-pronged invention, channeling various pop ethos throughout antiquity to present day, and effortlessly merging cultural implications.

 

Interconnecting planes of white create an optical push-and-pull with the wall, while the color patterns— painted in oil— have a rhythmic timing, interspersed within structural black lines of a consistent width, serving as a kind of skeletal energy vector. She uses directionality to imply movement and keep the objects looking as if they are in a constant state of transition. The markings also suggest camouflage for a world of Levine’s invention, bringing the viewer to wonder about the place these objects might inhabit; what flora exists there, what environmental obstacles spawned these forms.

 

Two x Two, for instance, implies a range of motion with fibrous directional lines fanning out to flippers and claws. The term carcinization describes an evolutionary phenomenon in which nature seems to push creatures to evolve into crablike forms, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to Levine’s own stylistic evolution. Ambrosia is a complex cluster of starburst shapes, appearing at once galactic and microbial, coiled and in bloom. The seductive posturing of this sculpture more than any other seems to wear its colors with the natural signifier of danger. The conspicuously titled Googlie, the smallest of the group, looks back at the viewer from multiple vantage points with bundles of swirling irises that intimate an animated quality, almost biomechanical in nature.

 

Occupying the intersections of idolatry, fetishism, and kawaii aesthetic, Levine manages to de-emphasize specificity— despite her bold stylistic choices— in favor of perceptual association and semantic memory.

 

Jill Levine lives and works in New York City. She received her BA from Queens college and her MFA from Yale, including a semester at the Royal College of Art in London. She is the recipient of both a Guggenheim and NYFA Fellowship, and her work is included in prominent collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dorothy and Herbert Voel collection at the National Gallery of Art in D.C., and Art in Embassies collection in Mumbai.