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BIOGRAPHY
Jordan Holms is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in painting and textiles. She has exhibited internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Her work is also held in multiple private collections. Holms's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Marrow Gallery, a group exhibition at the de Young Museum, as well as at SFMOMA Artists Gallery, BAMPFA, and Adidas’s San Francisco Market Street storefront. Holms earned a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019. She lives and works in London, United Kingdom.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Grappling with our fraught relationship to the built environment, Jordan Holms's practice examines how space is materialized, organized, and made to mean. Mining sites that she encounters online and in the everyday, her work unsettles the prescribed distinctions between space and place. Holms's work also takes into account objects that are coded in ways that produce space: decorative moldings; cement barricades; period furniture; 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 makes meaning. In order to arrive at more nuanced definitions of space, she translates the associative properties of these materials – their colors, shapes, and textures – into abstract planes and forms.
Fluorescent colors are especially prominent in Holms's work because of their authority. They are instructional colors that signal how bodies can, and cannot, move through the built environment. Stripes and grids are important parts of her vernacular as well. Not unlike fluorescents, they are architectural means of policing how bodies are regulated in space. The duality of these aesthetic elements in her work is significant in the sense that, historically, they have operated as signifiers of both power and oppression in material culture. Holms's work intends to trouble their authority by collapsing seemingly incongruent economies of space in on one another.
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