Tillman: We think about nature, place it in relation to our human lives. It has significance for us because we make it, or don't make it, significant.

Stockholder: But I also think that it does exist esparately from us, as distinct from Jameson's lecture, which doesn't. Jameson's lecture exists only in so far as he made it. He manufactured his lecture, which can exist next to a tree or inside a university building. In my work I manufacture something like that, like his lecture, that's very abstract and ordered, by me, and by the culture that houses me. But all that I make is meshed with, and sits on top of, stuff that is incontrovertibly there. I understand that we could talk - and philosophers do talk, ad infinitum, about whether in fact it's there if you don't see it. But I - and I imagine most people - have an experience of some things as really there, and other things as not quite there. I'm interested in how those two experiences mesh.


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I think about taste a lot. House Beautiful the magazine reinforces and puffs up the notion of good taste, as if there's a right way to do it. My work opens that up to question and proposes that there is no right way to do it, that there's a lot of meaning apparent in the decisions that people make.

—Jessica Stockholder, 1995

"One of her commentators puts it that 'her meditation on how we build and perpetuate visual order can lead us at least to the fringes of meaning' - which we are now in a position to translate into the urban periphery - 'where anxieties about the orders we implicitly condone enter the field of vision'. —Bankowsky, Artforum