Building sense from whatever scraps you can find

Jess, A Cryogenic Consideration or Sounding One Horne of the Dilemma (Winter), 1980. Collage, 48x72 inches.

Jenny Odell in an article about collage artist Jess: article-https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/13-ways-jenny-odell?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Jenny odell in article about collage artist Jess:

Searching, finding, and filing—especially in seclusion, as Jess often worked—are what sense-making looks like to me. I grew up in a time of grotesquely proliferating information, easier than ever to access and with a seemingly total lack of structuring narrative. For me, collection and arrangement were a response, a necessary adaptation: you could give up and live in a senseless world, or you could set about building sense from whatever scraps you could find. But this arrangement could be a pleasure in and of itself, full of devotion to each little piece and to the kind of complexity that needs only finding, not making. In a short text collaged into an announcement for Jess’s 1989 show at Dilexi Gallery, Duncan calls Jess’s art “not impression, not expression, but an involvement in what is.” It is this assumption that meaning is to be found among what[already] is that I relate to most in Jess’s work.