About
“DeSchutter’s enterprise is a game with no endgame; a surface of sound as form by colour that both creates and confronts landscapes of paradox and quarrel, always evolving, devolving and resolving in never-ending curlicues of self-sponsorship and reciprocity.”
-Matt Carey-Williams, Dressing the Void: Entanglements of Allusion and Illusion in the Paintings of Jody DeSchutter
”There are two Jodys. Known and unknown. Word and sound. Shape and process. Id and ego. Both these Jodys weave in and out of each other, shaping, caressing, finessing a formal and epistemological pluralism that delights and penetrates both in juxtaposition and contradistinction. Jody speaks, sculpts, installs, performs and paints. And the commonality that runs through all these diverse pursuits is her intention to capture, isolate and amplify that very diversity, and all the paradoxes that come with being a spoken word artist who paints or a sculptor who performs. Connections abound across the widest possible plains and planes of creativity in the inventive art of Jody DeSchutter.”
-Matt Carey-Williams, Ebb Spiked: Palindromes of Practice and Purpose in The Art of Five Artists
Photo by Matt Favero @liminalwarp
Statement
My work traverses the endless feedback loops comprised of observation, perception, experience, and environment, and how they shape (and are shaped by) our personal and collective reality.
I have been particularly enamored by the quantum mechanical and the religious: their looping orbits sustain epiphany, confusion, void, and back again. Each representing vastly different and simultaneously similar approaches to the unknown. Each proposing ways of making the invisible visible; they are embodiments of the unknown.
Douglas Hofstadter refers to us conscious individuals as “little miracles of self-reference”. Perhaps by fully embracing the strange loops, reflections, translations, paradoxes, and uncertainties, we can illuminate connections rather than divisions; promoting alliances between seemingly opposite or incongruent ways of being.
DeSchutter received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria, Canada in 2016 and now lives and works in London, UK. Her work spans and intersects painting, spoken word, poetry, sound, installation, and performance.