Two Folds and Counterparts: Jill Downen at the OKCMOA by Tiffany Barber
The popular multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft features a Corporeality Spell that phases the virtual spell-caster between the physical and twilight realms. While the caster is able to vacillate between realms, the caster is also left exposed and vulnerable to bodily damage in both environments. World of Warcraft recreates in the virtual world what St. Louis-based sculptor Jill Downen takes up in the physical, material world with her site-responsive installations. Downen casts her own spell and addresses issues of corporeality in her latest project, Counterparts, creating environments wherein viewers vacillate between construction and decay, between reality and fantasy. Jill Downen’s artistic investigations into how the built environment and the human form respond to and are informed by respective systems and structures began when she was a painting and printmaking student at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1980s. Downen’s interests continued to evolve and she went on
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to receive her MFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis in 2001. Downen’s installations, drawings and models express a symbiotic relationship between the anatomies of architecture and the human form, conceptually focused on the forces of construction, deterioration, and restoration. From Posture of Place (2004) to (dis)Embody (2006) to Hard Hat Optional (2009), Downen’s installations temporarily transform empty walls and floors and immerse viewers in a sculptural redesign of a building’s space that literally melds the human form with the interior architecture. In the work, bulges, wrinkles, tendons and biomorphic elements typically protrude from walls, floors and support structures. Downen’s installations seek to enlarge the viewer’s awareness of space, time and place, and as the artist describes, “The work concerns the notion that a building is a body, conditioned by its materiality, location, social position, and cultural environment.” Downen’s work envisions a place of exchange and interdependence while
the work itself is dependent on an exchange with and relationship to the body, with her installations activated by the presence of the viewer. With Counterparts, Downen returns to her inquiries around architecture and the human body with ten original sculptures and explores various additional polarities, such as absence and presence, masculinity and femininity, and fantasy and reality. Two of Downen’s most recent projects, (dis) Mantle (2010) and Hard Hat Optional (2009), illustrate the artist’s conceptual concerns. Both projects emphasized the transformation of place. (dis)Mantle altered the interior of the Luminary Center for the Arts’ vaulted chapel by concealing doorways and electrical features and painting the entire space plaster white. With Hard Hat Optional, the work invited viewers to question whether the site was in a process of construction or deconstruction by navigating around lumber support structures, folds of architectural skin and precarious stacks of flesh-like blocks. One of the sculptures included in Hard Hat Optional, Component 9: Breast Blocks on Palette, made