Sculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside of a museum vitrine. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers these sculptures for examination in the context of two stately viewing cases in the center of an academic reading room in the Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library at Reed College. Perlitz titled the installation Reductions of Mountains, because ostensibly mountains need to be miniaturized to exist inside of libraries. This seems true. Each vitrine is filled with objects that may appear, at first glance, like huge potatoes of mountain granite—weathered, worn, and misshapen. Or perhaps they are the concrete ruins of something-that-once-was. What’s clear is that the associations are many, and they speak to place-based interventions into nature—mystical landscaping, retaining walls, or standing stones carried for miles across the landscape because of their vibrational frequencies.

Jess Perlitz is an artist whose work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. She is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently an associate professor and head of sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz is a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, a Joan Shipley awardee, and a recipient of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; Cambridge Art Galleries, ON; De Fabriek, NL; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency, among others. Her project Chorus is installed at Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.

Sponsored by the Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Free and open to the public.