Jill Levine | Vertical Deflection

February 7 - March 22, 2025

High Noon is pleased to present Jill Levine’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, Vertical Deflection. The title borrows its name from a phenomenon that disrupts gravitational pull, suggesting the ways physical forces can alter perception and experience. In urban planning, It’s also the name of a device used in roadway development, seen in the strong lines of crosswalks, roundabout markers, and striped reflectors that guide navigation, denoting how spatial orientation and design influence our sense of logic and order.

Eighteen mixed-media wall sculptures adorn the gallery walls in clusters and pathways that guide the viewer’s eye around the space. This constellation-like format offers a broader perspective on how Levine considers the individual sculptures while contemplating both the scientific and artistic dimensions of deflection. Similar to dazzle camouflage, the interplay of graphic elements painted on the sculptural forms are intended to disrupt quick interpretation, while the use of white creates a visual push-and-pull of positive and negative space. By challenging the expectation that graphic shapes should be easily legible, Levine sets up a tension between physical space and visual comprehension. The traditional relationship between the object and the gallery wall becomes distorted, reminiscent of how objects can alter the plumb line of Earth’s gravitational pull.

While the sculptures themselves contrast biomorphic and the utilitarian forms, the linework and diagrams echo the navigational markers of vertical deflections. From certain viewpoints they may appear as living creatures, while from others, they resemble historic objects unearthed from an archaeological site. They have succinct and cohesive palettes that evoke familiar environments, inviting ideas of evolutionary origin stories. As the viewer traces the Möbius strip patterns on the surfaces, the underlying structure begins to emerge. Slight angular shifts reveal a carousel of changing imagery, prompting us to question the object’s true nature and its purpose within the broader context of Levine’s playfully obscure mythology.

Vertical Deflection reflects the complexities of visual communication and the meanings we derive from various forms of representation. In her work, Levine emphasizes the necessity of multifaceted observation by highlighting that how we understand something— be it an object or a more abstract concept— is influenced by how we position ourselves in relation to it, encouraging us to embrace the nuances of our interpretations.

Jill Levine is a native New Yorker. She attended Queens College, where she earned her BA and also received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk, CT. She earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, which included a semester at the Royal College of Art in London. She has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1970’s in both group and solo exhibitions. In 2000 she was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2005 a NYFA Fellowship. Her sculpture is included among numerous private and corporate collections worldwide as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art in Embassies, Mumbai Embassy. She lives and works in New York.