Incorporating quotidian goods, Stockholder incorporates their aesthetic,and formal qualities, into works that are greater than the sum of their parts. She also welcomes the resonance of the ‘things’ she uses from the world with function, design, and issues of class and taste, even while deliberately disassociating them from their expected use. She has said, “on some level, I can make work out of anything.” Stockholder is not in search of the perfect object or material; rather, she is most concerned with how the works that she authors are in dialogue with the world around her. The assemblages feel deeply intentional, each component carrying great significance and entropy, and fluidly existing in a space that exalts the promiscuity of meaning and material.

Stockholder approaches each sculpture by accessing what she calls the “floating cloud of significance embedded in materials.” Of primary concern is the formal quality of a material: heavy or light, perforated or solid, textured or smooth. She brings in color and paint to complete a pictorial, illusionistic space. The illusory nature of the ground opens a world of possibility welcoming the deep dive of imagination. In essence, Stockholder encapsulates the behavior of a two-dimensional surface in the third dimension. At times, material functions as the organizing principle in the work, bumping up against fragments of illusion. At others, the material substance of the work recedes, and a pictorial structure takes over as the coherent organizing principle.

In “Landscape Truck Mirror,” Stockholder makes use of a mirror, angled so as to enable views of the underside and topside of the shelflike structure below, to be seen simultaneously on the single plane of the mirror.

During periods of time without access to her studio this past year, Stockholder embraced the challenge to find new ways of working. Her titles for many years now have often skirted the world of Poetry, and at this juncture she delved further into this interest, exploring conventions of form in Poetry as it has been historically prescribed. Compelled by the inseparable relationship between form and content, Stockholder incorporated this poetry into her sculpture in works like "March of Time Layered" and "March of Time on Trays." The integration of text necessitates the viewer to “read” the sculpture from left to right and top to bottom, despite this not being the natural organizational structure of sculpture. The brain begins to flicker back and forth between the apprehension of a picture and the discernment of meaning from text, an exercise that mimics an aesthetic gesture. Stockholder leans into the discomfort of this movement to ultimately present an exploration of awkwardness. 

For her more recent presentation at OGR Torino, Cut a rug a round square, on view through July 25, 2021, Stockholder was invited to curate an exhibition focused on painting and drawing from two major collections: the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna in Turin and the la Caixa Collection of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. The artist drew from both collections to explore the ways in which form is inextricably tied to both subject and content. Further, one’s apprehension of a surface yields information about reality, while simultaneously generating illusions that resonate with our capacity for imagination. Focusing on works in which rectilinear and circular forms play pivotal roles, Stockholder investigates the ways in which these two basic shapes resonate with the body, how they corral content, and how they contribute to making the edges of artworks.

The exhibition includes work by Francesco Clemente, Marlene Dumas, Robert Mangold, Edward Ruscha, Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Lawrence Weiner, and Rachel Harrison, among others. Stockholder also produced one new sculpture for the show, Squeezed orange actor stack: Ode to Liz Larner, 2020.