In the Studio with Jordan Holms

Jordan Holms is an interdisciplinary artist from Vancouver, Canada. Holms completed her MFA and MA simultaneously at the San Francisco Art Institute and has gone on to produce work that is informed by the spaces in which we inhabit and navigate, abstracting her experiences into bold and colorful compositions. Holms spoke with Alison Poon about urban and domestic spaces, color as a political statement and changes to the way the art world operates.

The work and presence of artist Jordan Holms is like a neon ray of sunshine. Producing largely with acrylic paint, Jordan builds complex pieces filled with rich paint and vibrant color, bringing the viewer into a juxtaposition of bright work and the exploration of our fraught human relationship to the built environment. Let’s dive into this with Jordan as we visit her studio now.

What materials do you use? And why?

I typically work in acrylic and have done so for a number of years. Acrylics tend to accommodate my process better than oils in the sense that I like to work quite quickly –– in bursts, with lots of layering, and acrylics lend themselves more easily to this. I have also recently gotten back into watercolors. There is an art store in San Francisco called Case for Making that hand-makes their own watercolors in an incredible range of colors (including fluorescents, which are really important in my work). I started working with these watercolors about a year ago and have since found them to be a very useful tool for experimenting with new compositions and strategies in a low risk, small scale, context. Typically, I will use watercolors to get the jitters out before I start painting, but often those process drawings become works in their own right.

What is your artwork about? What does it speak to?

My work grapples with our fraught relationship to the built environment. In my work, I examine how space is materialized, organized, and made to mean –– how space produces meaning. I think a lot about the coded distinctions between space and place, and how to unsettle the presumed divisions between public and private space.

I also think about my work as a way to arrive at more nuanced definitions of “space.” I have long collected imagery relating to domestic space and urban architecture that I both mine from the Internet as well as encounter in my day to day movements. Fluorescent colors are prominent in my work because they are highly instructional colors. When we encounter neons or fluorescents in the built environment they are typically dictating how bodies have to navigate through a space – they prohibit or beckon us into certain spaces, they keep us in our lane, they tell us where to enter and where to exit. They are incredibly authoritative colors –– both formally and politically –– so I think there’s a lot of visual, aesthetic, and political richness there.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I try to consider everything bound up within what we define as space or objects that are coded in ways that produce space: furniture, decorative moldings, cement barricades, wire fences, wallpaper, traffic signs, upholstery, pylons, venetian blinds. The things we find in our homes and out in the built environment that signal something about how that space is organized or materialized.

One of my favorite things is when I come across a wall that was clearly graffitied and someone has come along and tried to cover it up with a shade of paint that is almost, but not quite exactly, the same as the original color. Idiosyncratic details like this are important because they’re indicative of a space’s history. I also frequent antique stores and look at all of the clashing textures and patterns. I spend time walking around the city taking pictures of the bizarre color combinations of the row houses, or maybe the fluorescent spray-painted marks on sidewalks where the concrete has been compromised. I used to make collages from the images I took myself or sourced from the Internet and then make paintings based on those collages, but after a while I have built up such a large lexicon of imagery in my head that now I often draw on this memory bank and compose paintings that way.

Relocating to San Francisco from Vancouver legitimized a lot of my formal interests –– I have a penchant for highly saturated and fluorescent colors, as well as texture and pattern. San Francisco is one of the few highly developed cities in the United States where you can un-ironically paint your house eggplant purple with canary yellow trim or mint green with Pepto-Bismol pink and not have the rest of the neighborhood meltdown about it. Where I grew up, those kinds of palettes were very rare and definitely discouraged. But in SF I have endless source material.

I’m also interested in various forms of craftwork and textiles. In some paintings I’ll incorporate textile patterns as visual signifiers for domestic space, while still using abstraction as a tool to more broadly fold the home and city –– these seemingly discrete private and public economies of space –– in on one another.

Stripes and grids are an important part of my vernacular too. I think their duality is significant in the sense that, historically, they have operated as signifiers of both power and oppression in material culture –– think of something like the American flag versus 19th century prison uniforms, for instance. Architecturally, stripes and grids are also a means of policing how bodies are regulated in space. For instance, fences and window blinds both act as these delineations of space –– we can’t pass through them physically, but we can gaze through them and visually penetrate a space we aren’t meant to enter. They designate space –– they create a here and a there, an inside and an outside. And it is that “here and there” that I’m trying to collapse in on one another.

What is your typical routine when you get to the studio? Walk us through a typical studio day.

Ideally, I like to treat a studio day like a typical day job, because I’m a ‘middle of the day’ painter –– I don’t work well early in the morning or late at night. I recently spent a month in residency at the Vermont Studio Center and I would say that was my ideal studio schedule. Arrive around 9 or 10 am, settle in, and spend a few minutes cleaning up from yesterday’s session. Then I’ll usually start with a small format watercolor to warm up and if I feel like my hands and brain haven’t quite caught up with each other yet, I’ll spend some time working on one of my carpet tufts (which is another medium I have recently started working in). Sometimes this more mechanical process allows me to ease into the session rather than having to make critical decisions about paintings right out of the gate.

I’ve always said that I’m a sprinter when it comes to painting, not a marathoner. I’ll paint or do whatever I’m working on in short bursts throughout the day or across multiple days or weeks. I don’t like to work on one thing for a sustained period of time, so throughout the day I will continue a rotation of painting, tufting, and watercolor-ing.

It’s taken me a long time to learn that it’s important to consider things outside of actual art production as part of my process. In the past, I’ve been really tough on myself (especially while I was in school) for not working longer hours in the studio, but I’ve come to realize that a large part of what I do requires me to just stew on images and forms and textures and colors for a while until I can compose them into something that I want to make. Sometimes that takes weeks or months! I have come to value this kind of non-traditional research as equally productive and crucial as studio time.

What are you currently working on? Share with us what is exciting to you about this most recent work.

My studio situation has shifted quite significantly due to the pandemic, which has proved to be an interesting challenge to my conventional practice. That said, I am excited about the shifts in scale and materials that are occurring due to these circumstances. As I mentioned, recently I’ve been getting back into watercolors as well as teaching myself how to do carpet tufting, which are both more amenable to working from home. I am also working on a new body of paintings that examine the grid and its formal and political connotations.

Do you balance another job in addition to being an artist?

After finishing grad school in 2019 I was working six days a week as a curatorial assistant/gallery associate at two different institutions –– a museum in Napa and a non-profit arts organization in San Francisco. Since the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to reorganize the balance between my studio schedule and day jobs, so now I am spending much more time in the studio. In the past, I have taught studio and art history public education courses at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2021 I’ll be working with the company Art School, which provides online access to art courses for the public.

by Melanie Reese | Aug 11, 2023 | Artist Features