Jess Perlitz: Reductions of Mountains

September 15 - February 28, 2025

Reductions of Monuments is on public view during the Reed Library's open hours.
Library hours may be viewed here.

JESS PERLITZ ARTIST TALK
Wednesday, February 12, 2025, 6:30 pm in the Reed College chapel, Eliot hall

Sculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside a museum diorama. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers these sculptures for examination in the context of two stately glass cases in the center of an academic reading room in the Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library at Reed College.

Perlitz titled the installation Reductions of Mountains, because ostensibly mountains need to be miniaturized to exist inside of libraries. This seems true. Each vitrine is filled with objects that appear, at first glance, like big roundish pieces of mountain granite—weathered and worn over time, like Olmec heads, or the concrete remains of something-that-once-was. There's something gentle and sensual about their roundness

We can imagine the forms as the fragments of a megalithic temple—excavated and on display in a natural history museum in no particular order—evidence of human industry and evolution. Maybe they’re anthropomorphic stones from an ancient altar, or the bulbous body parts of a long-defeated giant. What’s clear is that the associations are many, and they speak to place-based interventions into nature—mystical landscaping, retaining walls, or standing stones carried for miles across the landscape because of their vibrational frequencies.

These aren’t the first boulders Perlitz has sculpted. In the exhibition Glory, Glory (2022, Holding Contemporary, Portland), a kindred, tomato-shaped boulder sat on the floor in-between the front and back galleries. It was the perfect shape and height for a stool, but closer inspection revealed traces of water or wetness—lightly pooled on the “seat” and trickling down the front. It wasn’t repulsive, more like the evidence of a “little accident” perhaps. Glory, Glory has a softly comedic and childlike feel, but it also recalls the shame inflicted over bedwetting and other private excretions.

Over the last two decades, Perlitz has turned her deadpan and tragicomic sensibilities toward the self-effacing performance of awkwardness and marginalization—like the vaudeville skits performed by nineteenth-century Irish and Jewish immigrants. These routines revolved around the predicament of the unlikely protagonist or antihero. The predicament is the ethos of slapstick, and its message is funniest when everyone knows the outcome. The story never changes, just the context and interpretation. If there’s a banana peel onstage, someone will slip on it. They’ll be embarrassed, but not injured. It’s how and why they slipped that’s the amusing part—and it’s based on the predicament they were in when the whole thing started.

Of course, there are predicaments and there are predicaments. Immigrants performing their inferiority were less threatening when seen in this light. Slipping in the back door of the restaurant to fend off starvation, and feed your children—ala Charlie Chaplin—one better be ready to defuse the situation with some shenanigans. To this end, props like the banana peel function as the perfect distraction. Today, living in a city inundated by bombs is a predicament; suffering from PTSD after returning from active military service is a predicament too.

Perlitz is brilliant at creating objects that elicit multiple histories and emotions—objects that whisper to us about who and what we are. In Reductions of Mountains, Perlitz’s boulders remind us that appearances are unreliable. We are always categorizing the objects around us, and interpreting our lives in their wake—shifting their scale to our needs and desires. In Perlitz's words: "The museum exhibition has become a pickle jar."

Jess Perlitz (b. Toronto, ON) is an artist whose work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. She is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently an Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz is a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, a Joan Shipley awardee, and a recipient of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; Cambridge Art Galleries, ON; De Fabriek, NL; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency, among others. Her project Chorus is installed at Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.

Reductions of Mountains is organized by the artist and Stephanie Snyder, Anne and John Hauberg Curator and Director, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend Peter Simensky (1975–2024).