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Jessica Stockholder: Flooded Chambers Maid
Flooded Chambers Maid is a site-specific project installed on and around the Oval Lawn by the genre-bending sculptor, painter, and installation artist Jessica Stockholder. For over two decades, she has realized an independent and hugely influential visual language that applies a painter’s sense of form, pattern, texture, and color to sprawling constructions in space. Using a staggering variety of media, from heavy-duty construction material to mass-produced commercial products and live horticulture, Stockholder’s assemblages of unlikely materials combine and bloom into a colorful, but planned, chaos. Inspired by the interplay of natural and man-made patterns in the design of Madison Square Park, Flooded Chambers Maid is anchored by a 1,300 square foot platform sprawling across the northern end of the Oval Lawn. The platform — a vibrant combination of custom-cut and colored industrial steel and molded fiberglass grating — emerges from a shock of chromatic rubber mulch. The platform’s pop colors spill from its edge, leading to a staircase and viewing platform installed on an adjacent lawn. Visitors are invited to view the project’s garden: swaths of bright flowers and bold-hued plastic bins and buckets that form an energetic expanse. Stockholder is distinguished for teaching a generation of art students with substantial influence.