While you’re in town for ALAC 2020, be sure to check out the solo exhibition by Jessica Stockholder, DIGITAL THOUGHTS, now on view at 1301PE’s Wilshire Boulevard gallery—an ALAC participant since its debut eleven years ago.

“Paintings don’t hang on trees,” Jessica Stockholder told the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1990, speaking about the already long-standing engagement between her work and its context. Stockholder’s wall works, sculptures and installations are dynamic interactions with the architectures for which they are created and where they are displayed.

Not just intervening in their context, Stockholder’s work creates new contexts, in which paintings can be horizontal on the floor, sculptures can climb up walls, and playful interior design elements can merge the two, all reflecting the complexity of bodies in space. At her most recent solo show, DIGITAL THOUGHTS, Stockholder makes this reflection literal: relying on the material of mirrors such that the space of the gallery as well as the viewer herself appear at once contained within the work and reflected back outside of it.

DIGITAL THOUGHTS, on view January 18th to February 29 at 1301PE, takes as its starting point the parallax of meanings in the word ”digital”: relating both to the ten digits of the hand and to the opposite of analogue, to data and information displayed by machine. As the artist herself notes, just as thoughts are always already embodied, the machine and the handmade are always interdependent rather than discrete. The fuses of color, 3-D gestures of stacked and repeated forms, some recognizable readymades like lamps and stools, some abstract sculptures, question the sense and essence of everyday objects.

Born in 1959 in Seattle, Washington and currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois, Stockholder has been exhibited around the world and is represented in the permanent collections of many museums including the Whitney, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; SF MoMA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The British Museum, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.