Adams and Ollman is pleased to present Ruined Windows, an exhibition featuring glass sculptures by Jessica Jackson Hutchins as well as new collaborative works by Hutchins and the artist Marley Freeman.

Hutchins’ expansive practice includes sculpture, painting, collage, video, installation and performance. Well-known for her sprawling, layered sculptural assemblages composed of an array of everyday objects, some found, some personal, Hutchins explores and pushes materials, media, and meaning. The artist’s formally inventive works are accumulations of mundane rituals transformed into reverential objects that are as idiosyncratic as they are familiar. Through touch and accretion, Hutchins utilizes form, color, and reference to illuminate the connections between ourselves, the world, and the generative interactions therein.

In 2016, Hutchins began to experiment with glass as a new medium, first utilizing fused glass for a breakthrough site-specific piece at an abandoned Christian Science Church in rural Pendleton, OR and then going on to make a major new glass work for the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA and a permanent installation for the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Glass is now a fixture in Hutchins’ already wide-ranging interdisciplinary artistic vocabulary.

Central to the exhibition at Adams and Ollman is Presence, 2017, a free-standing sculpture that combines fused glass with the artist’s signature ceramics. Partially supported by an expressive metal line that frames and supports the glass and presents the viewer with a lumpy clay vessel, the sculpture, expressive and intimate, features ethereal passages of glass that compound into a rich assemblage of texture, color, light, and imagery.

Symbolic references to the spectrum of human emotion—teardrops, a prominent exclamation mark, swirls of color overlaid with sharp edges and tangled patterns—meet allusions to the body through the visible signs of work done by human hands. Also on view will be new collaborative works that combine Hutchins' emotive glass works with shaped abstract paintings by Marley Freeman, known for her oil and acrylic paintings on linen and canvas. The resulting works are dynamic formal experiments that push the boundaries of visual language, urgently calling attention to the outer limits of image-making, language, and rationality.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago, IL; lives and works in Portland, OR) has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, West Yorkshire, UK; the Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; and The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. In 2022, Hutchins was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2020, received the Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College, OH, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.

Marley Freeman (b. 1981 in Boston, MA, lives and works in New York, NY) has had recent solo exhibitions at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Karma, New York, NY; Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico; and Janice Guy at MBnb, New York, NY. Freeman’s work can be found in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder, CO; and the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY.