Sep 22nd, 2020 • 8 minute read
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Curations with Jordan Holms: As Above, So Below
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We are very pleased to announce and welcome Art in Res artist and curator Jordan Holms to our curatorial program. We will now be graced with Jordan's thought-provoking curations on a regular basis and we could not be more excited! If you missed Jordan's Meditations on the Grid curation the other week, we strongly encourage you to check it out here. Please join us in welcoming Jordan Holms to our rockstar curatorial roster!
As colder weather approaches, and we all begin to spend more time inside, I want to pay attention to one of the more familiar, and maybe overlooked, spaces in our architectural environments. The staircase carries with it significant symbolic meanings that have been used in art, literature, music and film for centuries. Alfred Hitchcock often used the staircase as a visual metaphor in his films, and most will be familiar with the Penrose (or “impossible”) Stairs made famous by artist M. C. Escher.
This week’s curation takes a look at the various ways in which artists take on staircases as subject matter. In dream analysis, a staircase often represents a kind of journey. A simple, uniform set of stairs might imply logic and rationality, whereas spiraling stairs might symbolize mystery or disorientation. With these binary associations, stairs are often a symbolic means of communicating duality. Not surprisingly, many contemporary artists are still captivated by staircases and stairwells.
Dreamscape
This quiet, fuzzy scene by artist Renée Caouette strikes me as having a particular dream-like quality. Soft light pours through the windows and bathes the staircase that ascends to nothing in a cool glow. The composition denies the viewer any pleasure in confirming what lies beyond the top of the stairs. Decidedly, it is most likely just the second floor, but the lack of visual evidence encourages one’s imagination to run wild with possibilities. The painting is titled Marat’s Stairway and the artist explains, “Marat’s stairway is an allegory to Jacques Louis David’s infamous painting of his friend and revolutionary, Marat. The light and direction of movement allude to the passing from life to death and the mysteries of the unknown to come.”
Renée Caouette explores ubiquitous themes through the eyes of a millennial such as identity, feminism, death, equality and addiction, making her work not a quotidian narrative but rather a relevant and relatable story. Caouette has lived between the United States and Paris, France studying fine art and art history. She now resides in NYC and teaches courses at the Art Students League and New York Academy of Art.
Shadows
Perhaps a lot of artists are captivated by stairs because of the complex and delicate shadows they tend to cast. Such is the case for artist Matthew Tucker who focuses on external stairways, and the interplay between light and shadow that they create. This red hot painting, aptly titled Staircase, reminds me of an unusually blistering hot day in early fall, the kind where the sun unexpectedly pelts down on the city and brings everything to a boiling temperature. Visually opposite to the cool black shadow it casts along the building, the white metal of this staircase is surely hot to the touch and leads towards yet another impenetrable space.
Mathew Tucker’s formative years spent traveling with his family fuel his interest in exploring his sense of place, a recurring theme in his work. Tucker studied Art and Design at West Surrey College of Art and Design and later at London College of Printing (London Institute), before moving to Ireland in 2006 to study for a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art at Sligo Institute of Technology. In 2014 Tucker moved to New York City to earn an MFA at Hunter College. Tucker continues his practice at his Red Hook studio in Brooklyn, New York where he lives and works.
Cacophony
Unlike many of the other works in this curation, this acrylic print titled Elvis2RabbitsPhilip (Right Panel) by Steve Moors is heavily populated with figures. In this instance, the stairs recede more into the background of the composition, and although they are not the focal point, their sharpness does underscore the cacophony taking place in this scene. This work is another dreamscape, albeit a more anxious one than Renée Caouette. Moors states that his work, “is essentially driven by my fascination with the incongruities and conflicting self-deceptions created by the struggle between our primal and present modern selves."
Steve Moors’s work has an organic appearance, yet it is rendered digitally. Moors has exhibited at many galleries and museums, including The Victoria & Albert Museum in London. An Op-Ed piece in Masthead magazine featuring his art is soon to come out. Moor has recently contributed to The Bailey House Art Auction, a celebrity charity in benefit of people with HIV.
Illusions
What initially drew me to this small-scale ink and graphite drawing by Sam Schonzeit was the graphic, stripped down approach the artist has taken to interpreting stairs as a visual pattern. Thinking back to how staircases often reference metaphorical linkages, this work seems to tap into a way of visually representing different planes, both physical and conceptual. The minimalist aesthetic allows the viewer to focus on the careful use of line, space, and depth to create nuanced optical illusions, reminiscent of M. C. Escher.
Born 1972, New York City, Sam Schonzeit has degrees in religious studies and architecture and both of these disciplines inform his work. Born and raised in New York, his studio is in several rooms in a warren of an old house in Marfa, TX. From one of these rooms he can gaze out over ranchland and up to Mount Livermore, the fifth highest peak in Texas (8,378ft).
Ascending or Descending
We can’t have a curation about stairways without featuring a flight of subway stairs. This oil and cold wax painting, titled Climb, by Charis Ammon perfectly captures the muted light of those familiar underground passages. Although the title implies a clear direction, it’s difficult to tell whether the staircase is actually ascending or descending the longer one observes the composition. The peculiar angles of the painting are altogether disorienting, but I feel completely transported into the painting because of its commanding use of perspective.
Charis Ammon has been curious for as long as she can remember. She received a BFA in Painting at Texas State University in San Marcos in 2015 and an MFA in Painting at the University of Houston in 2018. Ammon is now represented at Inman Gallery in Houston as of September 2019. She is now living, working, and painting in Queens.
Escapism
Artist Marilyn Henrion takes a distinct approach to conveying the particular significance of stairways. Employing her signature technique, Great Escapes I is a digitally manipulated photograph, pigment printed on cotton, hand-quilted, and then wrapped on stretched canvas. What is compelling about this work is not only how the fire escapes operate as a visual metaphor for escapism, but how the artist pulls the geometry of the space to the foreground. The viewer is aware that this is an exterior of a building, but the dizzying concentric circles that the artist has hand-quilted into the work also abstract the ornateness of the facade, making room for an appreciation of the geometric relationships that form the series of escapes.
As a life-long New Yorker, Marilyn Henrion's aesthetic vision has always been deeply rooted in the urban geometry of her surroundings, from the earlier geometric abstractions to the more recent mixed media works. She is particularly interested in the co-existence of past and present, especially in architecture and other man-made structures. The presence of the human hand upon the landscape expresses our eternal yearning for immortality, evidence that says “I was once here”.
Absurdist
This painting by Nikki Shapiro, titled The Armory, is compelling because of its absurdist quality. An assemblage of seemingly unrelated objects set the scene –– a bat in flight, a multi-colored umbrella and a set of cement stairs are couched by a salmon-colored edifice. Here, the artist offers up a scene for which the viewer must construct their own narrative. The seemingly arbitrary grouping of these figures accentuate the dream-like quality of this oil painting –– it is at once humorous and haunting.
Born in Brooklyn. Nikki was a musician most of his life. In 2014 he decided to teach himself painting by diving in headfirst with the approach of learning by doing. Embracing the unknown and trusting his intuition he has been producing many works both haunting and decorative.
Austere
An expert at depicting minimalist, monochromatic staircases, artist Samantha Morris captures the stillness and austerity of an empty staircase in Leading, an oil on panel painting. The texture, contrast and use of negative space in this painting allows it to exist as both a study of architectural space and an abstract composition simultaneously. The shadows cast on these twin staircases position one as descending, and the other as ascending, which emphasizes the metaphorical duality often associated with stairs. Moreover, one leads into dark, the other into light. The artist states of her work that “It exists in the “in between”, the time when your eyes adjust to the contrast of natural illuminated light and the depth of darkness. I feel immersed, traveling through such spaces. Each piece has reference to an environment, while existing in its own space.”
Samantha Morris was born in 1995 and grew up in Madison, Connecticut; she now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Morris graduated from The University of the Arts in 2017 with a BFA in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing.
Bringing it Together
Stairways captivate us because they are full of possibility. They are a hallmark of change, discovery, and the unknown. Some of the works in this curation take a more traditional approach to documenting the timeless metaphors stairways provide, such as with Charis Ammon or Renée Caouette’s work. Others take up more graphic interpretations like Sam Schonzeit or Steve Moors. Some focus on geometry, like Samantha Morris and Marilyn Henrion while others like Nikki Shapiro and Mathew Tucker capture the personalities of stairways with vibrant color. Although their primary function may be to simply join two floors, these artists show us that stairways and wells and cases can unite not only spaces and people, but ideas and states of being.
About Jordan Holms
Jordan Holms is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in painting, sculpture, and textiles. Her work examines how space is materialized, organized, and made to mean. She has exhibited internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and her work is held in multiple private collections. In addition to a solo exhibition at Marrow Gallery, her paintings have been included in a group show at SFMoMA Artists Gallery, a number of MFA survey exhibitions, featured at BAMPFA, and in Adidas’s San Francisco Market Street storefront. Most recently, Holms was a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Artist Grant, where she was an artist-in-residence in February 2020. She is also a 2016-2019 recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute’s Graduate Fellowship Award. She earned a Master of Fine Arts and Master of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019, where she graduated with honors. Holms lives and works in San Francisco, California.