Jessica Houston, The Long Haul Jessica Houston ’s exhibition Over the Edge of the World offers a set of alternative history narratives constructed around polar exploration. It relies upon a set of different material approaches (collage, video, objects, oil painting, and ink), each discretely investigating a different perspective on the space. This includes a feminist alternative history of exploration, surrealist imagery of exploration that takes on a nearly mystical quality, maps, and collages fashioned largely from National Geographic magazine. In this respect, the show makes many of the same rhetorical gestures, and probes some of the same issues as Patrick Bérubé’s more enigmatic and humorous Mother Rock! exhibition in the same space a few months ago (March-April). Spanning two large rooms and broken into half a dozen distinct sections, Houston’s exhibition is sprawling, each aspect adding a different spin to her basic theme. Presumably, the scale is intended to convey
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.