JESSICA STOLLER: SPLIT

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Split, Jessica Stoller’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

February 28 – April 5, 2025

Featuring a new series of freestanding sculptures, wall works, and a large-scale ceramic still-life, this exhibition synthesizes historical, cultural, and personal narratives that grapple with the belief that “in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.”

Sparked by America’s ongoing repression of bodily autonomy, Stoller created “Seeing Red”, 2024, an evocative tableau composed of over 150 individual ceramic components positioned low to the ground. Deliberately debased, yet impossible to ignore, this installation draws inspiration from 18th and 19th century “anatomical Venuses,” pseudoscientific wax sculptures of slumbering women, often adorned with strands of pearls. In Stoller’s version, these pearls are stripped of their traditional ties to beauty and seduction. Instead, they adopt an ominous quality, looming large atop the marbled, blood red tiles. 

Referencing the elaborate ceramic platters of 16th century French potter Bernard Palissy, Stoller also intersperses this tableau with amphibians, shells, abortifacient plants, fractured body parts, broken shards, birth control tests, and crumpled underwear to underscore the connection between the natural world and the female body as subjugated entities. Dizzying and complex, “Seeing Red” confronts a world that repeatedly denies gendered female bodies dignity and self-determination. 

Taken together, the works in Split suggest that, as philosopher and gender theorist Christine Battersby writes, “the experience of the female human in our culture has direct links with the anomalous, the monstrous, the inconsistent, and the paradoxical - in such a way that allows for a recontextualization or an opening up of embodied identity.”