Colter Jacobsen

Untitled (Untitled Passport II)

2010

Untitled (Untitled Passport II)

The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky. Stacked in the shape of a cube and available for visitors to take away, the passports did not offer citizenship, but rather invited participation in a sense of borderless “being.” Colter Jacobsen’s Untitled (Untitled Passport II) is a diptych showing two-page spreads from Gonzalez-Torres’s booklet. The perfect graphite renderings freeze the book with its pages splayed, wings perpetually open. But we cannot help feeling that the boundless generosity of Gonzalez-Torres’s piece finds a limit in Jacobsen’s unique, but copied, original. These images are behind glass, their meanings overtly codified by the artist, whose notes appear in pencil around the edges.

Since 2003, Colter Jacobsen has gained in visibility and importance in the Bay Area art scene. His photographs, drawings, and installations are often evocative and possess a certain sublimity. The influence of artists from the Bay Area “Mission School” is manifest in Jacobsen’s predilection for creating installations and assemblages from materials bought in thrift stores, lost personal items found in the urban environment, and recycled packaging with unusual detail. Writer Kevin Killian has pointed out that many of his Jacobsen’s works deploy a very sophisticated gay semiotics.

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Colter Jacobsen Untitled (Untitled Passport II)

Colter Jacobsen

Untitled (Untitled Passport II)