Juliet Jacobson | With All of Its Predicates

Juliet Jacobson’s drawings take as their subject items so quotidian they would typically not merit
more than a passing glance—a notched cutting board, a broken-in work glove, the twisted cord of
a phone charger: humble, common objects that many people own or come into contact with during
their daily routine. These items are marked by the suggestion of use: fingerprints haunt the grimy
surface of a computer screen; the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed point to the movements of unseen
figures. Such materials of everyday life allude to universal experiences, but only through the physical
particularities of each object, full of distinctive, singular presence imbued by the hand or a body that
has passed over its surfaces.
Each subject is reproduced at actual size, centered and isolated within the frame, and with the
aid of photographic studies Jacobson meticulously renders her subjects. Inherent in the labor required
to produce these drawings is Jacobson’s dual preoccupation with attention and vision: what insights
exacting transcription can yield; how distorting the technologies that extend human vision can be;
how a faithful representation can be clouded by an associated set of projected cultural meanings, a
haze of illusions.
Juliet Jacobson was born in 1977 in Puyallup, Washington. She holds a BFA from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from New York University. Jacobson’s work has been exhibited
nationally and internationally at galleries including Two Rams, Kevin Bruk, Friedrich Petzel, Monya
Rowe, and Southfirst, and at institutions including Syracuse University; Stavanger Kunstforening,
Norway; and the Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea. Jacobson’s work has been reviewed in Artforum,
ARTnews, and Mute, among other publications. Jacobson is represented by Season gallery in
Seattle.