October 2018
First presented in the artist’s debut exhibition at the gallery in 2014, Jordan Wolfson’s (Female figure) (2014) went on view at The Broad in Los Angeles in fall 2018.
A life-size animatronic sculpture, (Female figure) combines film, installation, and performance in the form of a curvaceous, scantily clad woman covered in dirt marks and wearing a witch mask. Dancing before a mirror, (Female figure) intensifies the focus on the gaze which is found throughout Wolfson’s work. While her general demeanor recalls Holli Would, the comic strip femme fatale played by Kim Basinger in the 1992 film Cool World, her body language is complemented by facial recognition software that enables direct eye contact with the viewer, as well as a monologue narrated by the artist. Wolfson pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the internet, and technology to produce ambitious and enigmatic narratives; his works often feature animated characters he has invented in order to provoke and explore a certain kind of viewing experience.
"I’d been thinking a lot about the viewer, and also thinking about sculpture, formally," Wolfson told the Los Angeles Times after it was announced that The Broad had acquired (Female figure); "I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My hope is that the work dips in and out of spectacle." He added, "I’m honored that my work will be on display in the city it was created in."
Cover Image: Jordan Wolfson, (Female figure), 2014