CHICAGO, IL—Volume Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Jennefer Hoffmann, and deep down in my little finger. Featuring a collection of recent ceramics, from the display of intimately scaled objects to architectural interventions, the exhibition brings together a body of work made within the last year. Central to many of the works on view are a series of clay formed gestures, which the artist refers to as “aches”—stand-ins of Hoffmann’s pinky finger in pallid hues of tan, dusty rose, ochre, and charcoal.
The unit of each ache, made by grasping the appendage of one hand with a mound of earthen material in the other, is assembled in one of two ways within the show. At its most expansive, as is the case in i cried for one year, 2 weeks, and 9 days (2020), Hoffmann’s impulse to catalogue the arrangement of hollow casts acts as a type of calendar. A daily ritual, whose final form appears still undone. Laid out upon the surface of the artist’s studio table in singular, accountable fashion, the presentation of the work stands in contrast to the artist’s many vessels on view. Stacked in circular configurations, like beehives or a hornet’s nest, the individual is sacrificed in favor of the whole. The titles of the works—such as flourish, more committed, one sunday morning—reverberate as phrases of longing, observation, or promises. In Hoffmann’s approach, the cavity of the material manifests two-fold; first as the shallow space made by the artist’s finger, left open and unfilled, then as the emptiness in center of the work that we intuit is there, but cannot see.
This sense of elsewhere, of a space that exists beyond reach, is further articulated in always there almost (2020), a six-foot high pedestal that occupies the center of the gallery space. Taller than most eye levels, the graphite-shaded tiles that compose the vertical structure function like a drawing of a barrier—its top surface remains just out of sight. With the absence of a collectible object resting on the platform, the sculpture hovers between the museological and the domestic—avoiding its claim to either aesthetic category, its uncanny presence leaves us with an unmet gaze. While the work affronts our view, it calls close attention to our bodies.
The tactility achieved across Hoffmann’s output within and deep down in my little finger is purposefully imperfect. The work touches upon, and is touched by, the fault of human effort; the psychological undercurrent that runs beneath the will for survival. In cling 1 and cling 2 (2021), we hold onto the world by a tenuous grip, mittened hands unable to securely grip the surface of the wall. Ideas arrive to us and leave just as quickly, like fast dissipating clouds (poof 1–5, 2021). A fallen scarf, river (2020), blue and undulating, is immortalized as a static stream. And at last, it is the bright and shining apparition of cover (2020), a brilliant orange swim cap, whose elastic rubber is replaced by rigid glazed ceramic, that underscores the essential question posed by Hoffmann’s work. As poet Louise Glück writes in The Empty Glass, “and it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying […] what are we without this?” She closes,
And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.
