Dec 1st, 2020 • 11 minute read
Share
Curations with Jordan Holms: Sehnsucht
Click/tap below to copy url
Much like some works of art, there are certain words that convey so much more nuance than can ever really be articulated through language. I like these kinds of phrases, they pull their weight and then some. Like seeing a Mark Rothko painting for the first time, these kinds of words make you feel indescribable, unnameable things that encompass much more complex feelings than the mere words we have assigned to emotions –– happy, sad, angry –– those words are not enough in these instances, more often than not those words fall far too short. Most languages have the kinds of laconic words that I’m trying to describe to you now, ones that succinctly convey intangible feelings and phenomena, the sort of words that make you feel understood, that make you feel known, seen.
One of my favorite words like this is the German word sehnsucht. I encountered this word over a decade ago in a poem by Friedrich Schiller of the same name. At the time I could not realistically appreciate the gravity of what this word was able to convey, only because I hadn’t yet experienced the very feelings it was created to describe. Roughly translated into English, it means desire, yearning, or longing; it is also loosely related to the concept of nostalgia. In English we don’t actually have the words to articulate what sehnsucht means holistically, but it has been defined as a sensation akin to “the inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what” or “a yearning for a far, familiar, non-earthly land one can identify as one’s home”.
The American novelist Carson McCullers described a sentiment similar to sehnsucht when she wrote, “We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
Much different than just wanderlust, inherent in the concept of sehnsucht is the inexplicable sensation that the place or the thing or the person that we are yearning for, but do not know, is somehow already familiar to us. We are homesick most for the places we have never known. How can you be homesick for something you have never known?
Now perhaps more than ever, with the restrictions on mobility so many of us are experiencing, we are all wrestling with some form of homesickness for things we have never known, things we wanted to know, had planned to know, or hope to know soon. So that’s what I’m going to write about this week. A little different than most weeks, I have selected this group of artworks because they all induce feelings in me that convey sehnsucht. Instead of describing the works, I’m going to describe the feelings and memories they trigger for me, and in doing so, I hope that you will be able to understand them more fully.
Smells like Evergreen
This heavily textured acrylic on clayboard panel painting by Camille Warmington smells like evergreen. It is thick and dewy. A microcosm of a formidable forest splayed out somewhere along the New England coastline. I have never been to the coast of New England, not really, but this painting is how I imagine it smells in winter, with a splash of sea-salted air. I think about running away to a shingled cabin somewhere in Maine or Vermont fairly often. It would be couched by so many evergreens like this one, a mess of brilliant pthalo greens in every direction, save for the ocean. I recently watched a film called Blow The Man Down, about two sisters who try to conceal a murder in a seaside New England town, and felt such a desperate familiarity towards the places in the movie that I could hardly stand to watch it.
Camille Warmington is a painter whose work reflects on artifacts and their connection to memory and mortality, place and presence. She studied painting at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and earned a Bachelor of Interior Architecture from Kansas State University. Her paintings have appeared in national, regional, and local juried exhibitions, been featured in New American Paintings, # 120, Friend of the Artist, #10, and received a Hunting Prize nomination. A mother of three, Warmington was born in Massachusetts, grew-up in Dallas, and lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Giddy Euphoria
This watercolor on paper work by artist Kenneth E Parris III makes me long for some inaccessible members-only club in London or Manhattan. This place has a long marble bar, brass fixtures, and cut-crystal coupes, the energy is decidedly 1920s. It is somewhere that I would never actually be allowed into, where I could drink champagne and accidentally slip into the men’s bathroom. The sparkling clean urinals would feel opulent in my stupor, shimmering in the warm light of a chandelier that hangs overhead. While I take in the not unfamiliar, but certainly taboo surrounding, I might quietly smile to myself, that kind of giddy, euphoric smile one gets when you look at yourself, a little tipsy, in a bathroom mirror, and the gleam of porcelain reflects off of your cheeks, making them burn bright.
Kenneth E. Parris III is a Brooklyn based Visual Artist born in Philadelphia, PA, raised in Austin, TX. He is a Creative Director in advertising and is the Art Editor of H.O.W. Journal.
Unhinged
This acrylic and collage painting by Claire Price draws me into that scene from the Shakespearean play Hamlet. You know the one, in which poor Ophelia, driven mad by the deaths of her father, Polonius, and her lover, Hamlet, drowns in a brook. The crux of Shakespeare’s play, it is unclear as to whether her drowning occurs by accident or on purpose, and is entirely dependent on whether you believe she had truly become unhinged. This scene has been represented countless times in art and film, one of the most recognizable by Sir John Everett Millais in 1851. Whenever I encounter depictions of it, I feel an innate longing for some Danish thicket, where I can watch myself being carried away by a river, in the same way I watch Ophelia in the museums. There is so much resolve in her coming undone, that makes me think perhaps she wasn’t insane in the least.
Claire Price is a New Zealand born artist living and working in New York City. An accomplished singer-songwriter, she was signed to Universal Music (France) and Festival/Mushroom (Australia). Painting took a singular focus in 2015, which coincided with the birth of her son and her relocation from Paris to the United States. Her studio is located in BedStuy, Brooklyn where she works almost exclusively in a figurative style inspired by vintage photographs and a disappearing natural world.
Potential for Adventure
I never thought an image of a deserted gas station would make me ache. But this painting by Mathew Tucker does. The unmanned pumps, a blistering pink sky, and wicked hot concrete –– this work could almost be a scene from Natural Born Killers with its painfully sharp colors (there seems to be a deep connection between film and sehnsucht for me). This oil on canvas painting makes me hurt for that quintessential American road trip that I’ve yet to do; unlike Mickey and Mallory, I hope mine will not be spurred on by a murderous tirade. Despite the insidious air that tends to accumulate around gas stations, there is always something prosaic about that space, even in the absence of other people. It promises familiarity, but also the potential for adventure. A gas station means that you’re going somewhere and that, more importantly, you’ve got somewhere to go. I feel utterly compelled by the sense of urgency that this image of a gas station musters in me, and similarly, this seems to be inherent in the concept of sehnsucht –– its instance, its instance on being recognized.
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.
Crystalization
This dry pastel on paper work by Michael Zolnowski is the late-night conversation, minus the people. You know the one I’m talking about. It usually happens sometime after 3 am, when the stragglers close ranks and settle down around someone’s parent’s decaying patio furniture. It’s always winter for some reason, so maybe you have to sweep some rain from the seat before sitting down and settling into a rambling, but tender, conversation about hopes, dreams, better days, bad days, take your pick, no topic is off limits. I’ve had many of these conversations in deck chairs, on patios, rooftops, and balconies that I might never visit again. But I also yearn for these conversations to crystallize in a more organized, more satisfying, more conclusive way than they ever have or probably ever will. They’re never what you want them to be, always messy, meandering, and only ever teetering on the brink of vulnerability. You’re never quite able to say the words that you really want to say. Even while I am in the midst of these conversations and especially afterward, I revise the order of the phrases in my head, trying to puzzle all the pieces into a whole that feels good, resolved enough that I don’t need to revisit them, though I still long for do-overs that will never take place.
Feverish Dream
This oil and acrylic on canvas painting by artist Kerry Lessard comes to me like a dream. It is less anchored in reality than the other works in this group, which makes it especially difficult to grasp. It is a feverish image –– I’ve seen this house before, I know it, but I also know that I haven’t. Denied much locational context save for a waifish tree and some bramble encircling the slat-wood house, it sinks into a floral ocean. The patterned background is reminiscent of a long-forgotten Hawaiian shirt. The ghost of a red wine stain lingers on, maybe it was only worn only once on vacation and then, after the spilt wine, discarded at the back of a closet. I wonder if that closet is somewhere in this house? I want to be in this house and on that vacation all at once. I wonder if the owners of this house felt the same? Did they take that vacation because they too felt homesick for a place they have never known? Perhaps they never returned to the house and that is why the grass is overgrown.
Mind-Palace
I am definitely the kind of person who thinks I could wander out into the wilderness and just make it like some sort of Alexander Supertramp. I am also definitely the kind of person who could not actually do this (so many responsibilities and such little skill). Regardless, this print by artist Robert Cameron Connelly is often the kind of mind-palace to which my sehnsucht lures me; an expansive, brushy marshland haunted by a grand array of snow-capped mountains. Growing up in the Pacific NorthWest, I feel a gravitational pull towards any landscape with towering mountains, like they’re begging to be witnessed. Observing the work, I simultaneously long to know this place and feel as though I’ve already been. The fuzziness of the shrubbery in the foreground is nearly as fuzzy as my recollection of whether or not I’ve been here, or just want to be here so badly that I’ve taken myself there.
Robert Cameron Connelly is an Austin, Texas based experimental large format photographer who often employs processes that meld analog photography with painting. His recent work explores the mythos of humanity and existence, rendering his own contemplations of self and self's unfathomable role in this cosmically infinite space into immersive images.
Sensation
One of the characteristics of sehnsucht that thrills me is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical location that one feels is already known to them, yet still yearns to become acquainted with. It can take the form of a state of mind, or any kind of condition. This acrylic and spray paint on canvas work by Melanie Reese transports me to a sensation that feels familiar but is altogether unknown, unnameable to me. Gazing at it, I become transfixed by the pink noodles suspended in space like floaters in my field of vision. It’s titillating and tactile; I want to insert myself in between the layers of hot pink organisms in the foreground and the swath of burnt orange in the background. The energy in this painting makes me long for a feverishly hot summer day in a desert landscape, the kind in Palm Springs or somewhere in Arizona, where the breeze is even hotter than the air itself.
Mel Reese creates abstract, minimal, color-based paintings exploring the act of painting itself through various techniques of layering. Layering occurs through repeated actions of outlining forms by ‘painting’ the negative space with liquid masking tape—a technique adapted from her printmaking experience. The shape of each form layer is not only informed by the forms and colors laid down prior, but by canvas size and the way in which the edge of the form interacts with the canvas edge. Melanie currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Conclusion
This week none of the works in this curation have much in common aside from the fact that they compel me to feel this concept, sehnsucht, that I can hardly articulate, and hardly understand myself, but that I know in my gut I can feel, and I already know that you can feel it too. There is something consoling in the particular kind of yearning that breeds familiarity. It is a kind of want that I’ve become so accustomed to, so intimately acquainted with, that I am able to convince myself that I have experienced the thing I long for –– the place, the person, the feeling –– without ever having arrived at or attained the thing itself. Sehnsucht hinges on one’s ability to cope with the impossibility of satisfying a homesickness for we know not what, or where, or who. It’s not about arriving at a destination or obtaining that which we desire, it’s about the enduring quality of yearning; enduring both the comfort of familiarity and the dissatisfaction of not being able to have that familiarity take shape in the way that we long for.
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.