Martos Gallery is pleased to announce Jessica Vaughn’s first New York solo exhibition, Receipt of a Form, on view from October 26 through December 10, 2017.

Vaughn’s practice considers how materials - new, used, and discarded - accumulate and inhabit space. She takes refuse and gives it legs. Her installations reflect on the improvised figurations that occupy and circulate through space, and the voids or holes left in their wake.

For her first solo show at the gallery, Vaughn has combined three bodies of work: Vaughn has collected scraps of upholstery and vinyl from a commercial vehicle seating manufacturer, and affixed them to plexi glass. Some of the shapes are recognizable like arm rests and seat cushions, while others seem completely abstract. They remain on the floor, where they were collected; Learning From the Work of Others (2017) is seven unique prints of carbon paper and one photocopy. Vaughn uses the carbon sheets to make notes in her studio, including a few notes on a pattern printout that was included in a bag of upholstery from the manufacturer, but some of those notes were already there; After Willis #008 (2017) is more noticeable on your way out. This constellation of reclaimed Chicago train seats is a continuation on a series that began in 2015. The almost complete row of seats is interrupted by the entrance to the gallery.

In Jessica Vaughn's Receipt of a Form, the negative space or absence does not imply neutrality. As coded language systematically moves people, holes, and material around, the works in the show become place holders for an institution.

* * *

Jessica Vaughn (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) received a B.H.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Selected exhibitions include: Receipt of a Form, Martos Gallery, NY; Invisible Man, Martos Gallery, NY; Material Deviance, Sculpture Center, NY; Itinerant Belongings, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; Round 39: Looking Back, Moving Forward, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; Fore, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. She was an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; and the Whitney Independent Study Program, NY. She is currently a 2017 New York Artadia Awardee finalist.

Vaughn Jessica

EXHIBITIONS

SELECTED WORKS