Jillian Conrad
40 winks
March 30 – May 26, 2024
40 winks
March 30 – May 26, 2024
A bit of bejeweled bark, a graphite rendering of a nineteenth-century maze, a system of string, brass, and pumice: Jillian Conrad’s installation draws from the material stuff of the world, harnessing the commonplace to suggest a network of phenomena. The title, 40 winks, is a found object, too: an idiomatic expression that easily suggests a short but restful sleep – get what you can as the world races by – and also coyly hints at the suggestion of more left unsaid. The number 40, a cipher with biblical overtones, is just enough to conjure the metaphysical.
A little shut eye can make the unseen seen. Night Writing is a form of counter-illumination and communication, initially envisioned as a military technology, later developed for broad application as braille. Here, a facilitating conclave, convening conversation, on a bark (hear: barque), a means of transport, its cargo a communiqué, slowly finding harbor. Envoy is another conveyance: a presence manifest in and through language, a time traveler and emissary. Languid in suspension and slow procession, nearly conjured, Envoy calls to mind the traveler Gulliver, who woke from shipwrecked sleep to find himself affixed by Lilliputian string from head to toe. The string: Daedalus’s wayfinding innovation, to survive the labyrinth.
Here, the string moonlights as a drawn line in space, held in place by airy rocks and a cylindrical graphite ballast. Conjuring a place of not-conscious reality, Conrad’s installation is composed of matter strung together in silent missives, shared language, and the promise of sleep.
A little shut eye can make the unseen seen. Night Writing is a form of counter-illumination and communication, initially envisioned as a military technology, later developed for broad application as braille. Here, a facilitating conclave, convening conversation, on a bark (hear: barque), a means of transport, its cargo a communiqué, slowly finding harbor. Envoy is another conveyance: a presence manifest in and through language, a time traveler and emissary. Languid in suspension and slow procession, nearly conjured, Envoy calls to mind the traveler Gulliver, who woke from shipwrecked sleep to find himself affixed by Lilliputian string from head to toe. The string: Daedalus’s wayfinding innovation, to survive the labyrinth.
Here, the string moonlights as a drawn line in space, held in place by airy rocks and a cylindrical graphite ballast. Conjuring a place of not-conscious reality, Conrad’s installation is composed of matter strung together in silent missives, shared language, and the promise of sleep.
Jillian Conrad’s artistic practice addresses themes of materiality and intangibility. Her sculptures and works on paper look to landscape and the details of the physical world as thresholds that connect the human and the universal, the visible and the invisible. Her work has been exhibited at and supported by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Bronx Museum, Smackmellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Core Program (at the MFAH, Houston) and Artadia. Recent solo exhibitions include The Earth as Air, Un Lieu Une Oeuvre, Ménerbes, France (2023), Hydras, BioScience Research Center, Rice University, Houston, TX (2022), and Airspace, Devin Borden Gallery, Houston, TX (2019). Conrad’s work has been reviewed and discussed in numerous publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, Art Lies, and The New York Times. She is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Sculpture Department at the University of Houston. A recent recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship, Conrad will, in the fall of 2024, travel to Cardiff University in Wales where she’ll be making drawings and sculptures inspired by research and encounters with the region’s holy wells.