JORDAN HOLMS

ARTIST STATEMENT

 

Space is made and unmade. Grappling with our fraught relationship to the built environment, my practice examines how space is materialized, organized, and made to mean. Mining sites that I encounter online and in the everyday, my work unsettles the prescribed distinctions between space and place. My 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, I translate the associative properties of these materials – their colors, shapes, and textures – into abstract planes and forms.

 

Fluorescent colors are especially prominent in my 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 my 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 my work is significant in the sense that, historically, they have operated as signifiers of both power and oppression in material culture. My work intends to trouble their authority by collapsing seemingly incongruent economies of space in on one another.