Jesse Stecklow, From Ear to Ear, 2019. Ear of corn, corn whisky (derived from corn), acetic acid (derived from corn alcohol), ear drops (containing acetic acid), air sampler data, silkscreen on paper, wood, glue.

Jesse Stecklow

Jesse Stecklow’s practice engages modes of data collection and information flow, processes which are translated into sculptures and installations. Individual works are the result of aggregation and of recursion, referencing both earlier artworks and prior installations, creating a web of connections between works past, present, and future. Many of his sculptures either collect information (Air Samplers which ultimately are used to produce a report on particles in ambient air), display results (an Ear Wiggler which produces images of ears collected by an Ear Collector), or deal with binaries (glue traps which are active or inactive, lights which are cool or warm, kinetic sculptures which are in motion or still).

In early 2023, Stecklow will present his second solo exhibition at Sweetwater; at Frieze London 2022, he will exhibit a new series of works, again with roots in prior works of his. These projects follow his first two institutional solo exhibitions, Components in the Air at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton (2021), and Terminal at mumok, Vienna (2022), both documented below.

Jesse Stecklow

Terminal at mumok

April 20, 2022 – September 25, 2022

“Practices of collecting, analyzing, and circulating material data constitute the foundation of [Stecklow's] artistic work. Viewers encounter the data collections compiled by Stecklow mainly in their sculptural form. He describes his approach as follows: 'A lot of my interest has been around pursuing modes of aggregating material or more specifically data collection, and how that might manifest and function through a sculpture. I’ve been thinking about art objects as human assisted traps through which information can flow.'”

– Marianne Dobner, from Please Wait!, a catalogue essay for Jesse Stecklow, Terminal at mumok, 2022.

“The work is this sort of continuous, open-ended time line that engages ideas around simultaneity that feel very present, the way we can see several examples of the same kind of object around us in different states of deterioration or function. [...] So the Mumok show includes these four table forms. Each table has both new and old sculptures on it, but they plot a sort of time line or moment within my work-the fourth table is the present, as it were. It’s my own working toward the show within the show.”

– Jesse Stecklow, from an interview with Travis Diehl published in Artforum, 2022.

From left to right:

Untitled (10:19:30), 2014, Clock parts, clock guard, air sampler

Glue Trap for Non-Living Things, 2019, Aluminum, MDF, gum rubber, trapping glue, moth balls

Untitled (2:59:00), 2022, Clock parts, air samplers

Untitled (9:56:25), 2022, Clock parts, acrylic, air samplers

“Jesse Stecklow’s exhibition Terminal creates its own cosmology that reflects on notions of time, space, materiality, circulation, and transformation. Many elements, such as the air samplers, ear wigglers, box sets, light metronomes, sound boxes, and fossilized whale eardrums already exist as discrete works of art but are here reconfigured and recombined, becoming a part of an ever-evolving set. It’s not quite clear if each work was ever to be shown on its own, or if the exhibition, more like a Gesamtkunstwerk, is one large audio-visual installation.”

– Lisa Long, from Ear to Ear to Ear to Ear, a catalogue essay for Jesse Stecklow, Terminal at mumok, 2022.

All images courtesy of the artist and mumok, Vienna.

Jesse Stecklow

Components in the Air

at Princeton University Art Museum

November 6, 2021 – January 2, 2022

“Abstraction of a different sort emerged for Stecklow’s solo exhibition, Components in the Air [...] This time using the unique quality of the space as an eighteenth-century home divided into four domestically scaled rooms to punctuate the doubling with an introduction and a surprising conclusion. The viewer was greeted by a solitary polished aluminum air sampler. This introduced the viewer to the framing conceits of data collection and the environment which was presented through the aspect of the sampling device as well as that of the work’s reflective surface, which brought the gallery space, and the viewer, into the surface of the sculpture.”

– Alex Bacon, from Jesse Stecklow’s Recursive Aesthetics, a catalogue essay for Jesse Stecklow, Terminal at mumok, 2022.

Untitled (Air Sampler), 2016, Buffed aluminum, steel, piano hinges, magnets, hardware

“I like to think of a show as an unsettled group of objects between two events. It’s what I was thinking a lot about with the air sampling works: sculptures that contain samplers would record the volatile compounds floating around in the air of a space for the duration of the exhibition. Then, that sampler would go off to a lab and provide me with a data set. I would analyze that as a list of potential material decisions. Those works are always pointing to their future iterations.”

– Jesse Stecklow, from Nice to Meet You, and interview with K.r.m. Mooney, originally published in Mousse, 2015

Foreground: Ear Wiggler (Metronome Light), 2021. Background, on wall: Anagram, 2021

“The hybridity of his work comes from the transformation and circulation of different ideas, materials, functions, and narratives, whether that means going from ear to ear, from micro to macro, or from the personal to the cosmic. All these perspectives are flung into conversation, always ambiguous and absurd but never without connection to something else. What we find when we crack open the outer layer is another layer -or microcosm- following a stacking doll principle. But as things come and go, and as each new cycle begins, eventually, everything will move on to a new destination.”

– Lisa Long, from Ear to Ear to Ear to Ear, a catalogue essay for Jesse Stecklow, Terminal at mumok, 2022.

All images courtesy of the artist, Sweetwater, Berlin, and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton.

Jesse Stecklow (b. 1993, Cambridge, US) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions include Sweetwater, Berlin (forthcoming, 2023), Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna (2022); Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton (2021); Sweetwater, Berlin (2019); M+B, Los Angeles (2018); Chapter NY, New York (2016); and LOYAL, Stockholm (2016). He has been included in group exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2021); White Columns, New York (2021); Vin Vin, Vienna (2019); SALTS, Basel (2015); CLEARING; New York (2014). His art has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, Artnet and Mousse. Stecklow received a BA in Media Design Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2014 and was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2017.