Feb 16th, 2021 • 7 minute read
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Curations with Jordan Holms: Waiting
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Like the reclining nudes of the renaissance era, or more modern paintings by Mary Cassatt or Edward Hopper, the tedium of waiting has been an often-depicted subject in painting. Waiting has a bad connotation, mostly because it implies the passing of time. But more than just a temporal state, waiting can also be an emotional and psychological experience.
In his 1978 book, A Lover’s Discourse, the French philosopher Roland Barthes makes five claims about waiting.
- I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile or immensely pathetic…
- (The anxiety of waiting is not continuously violent; it has its matte moments; I am waiting, and everything around my waiting is stricken with unreality: in this cafe, I look at the others who come in, chat, joker, read calmly: they are not waiting.)
- Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.
- The being I am waiting for is not real [...] And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.
- “Am I in love? –– Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the other one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.
The work featured this week has been curated as a response to Barthes’s remarks about waiting.
Caught Between a Moment
It’s as if this painting, titled Page Corner 6, by artist Aldaberto Ortiz is caught between a moment and another moment. This work features a graphic arrangement of lines in both the foreground and background, with elements of architectural design trapped in between. It is reminiscent of a methodically executed Agnes Martin painting, or a stoic Frank Stella. I am waiting for the layers of this painting to slip . Caught between images, it conjures a suspenseful atmosphere.
About the work’s inspiration, Ortiz writes: “The subjects are folded page corners from magazines.These paintings came about when I noticed how earmarked magazine pages, when folded over, reveal the page underneath. The folded corner and the partial graphic underneath created an interesting abstract image when cropped.”
Anticipation
I am waiting for something bad to happen in this small painting. Artist Kerry Lessard writes that her work is interested in American narratives. Velvet captures a before moment; a time before the inevitable occurs. It has an electric sensibility - I feel concern, anticipation, and excitement all at once. The prominence of the rifle-wielding shirtless man in relation to the child in the foreground, with soft golden curls tied up in a bow, screams danger. I want to reach in and snatch her away, but I have to bide my time, observe how the events unfold. The other figures in the image appear unconcerned, which gives me pause about my own concern. I wait to interject.
Anxious Boredom
This intimate painting, titled Munich Residenz, reminds me of the ennui of waiting. While Barthes writes that waiting is an anxious, painful exercise, it can also be incredibly boring and tiresome at the very same time. At one point or another we have all restlessly wandered around the rooms of our home while on an important phone call. It’s impossible to sit still when the stakes are so high. This painting transports me to my parent’s dining room, where I would pace in circles, navigating furniture while tracing the design of the rug with my toes, ringing phone pressed tightly to my ear, while I wait for someone to answer my urgent call. In these moments, I am at once exceedingly bored by the tedium of calling someone on the phone, while also in extreme apprehension of their response.
Kenny writes that her work is about, “exploring ideas regarding history, portraiture, taste, and materiality. My practice is an alchemist exploration – I am making my acrylic paints, airbrushing, stenciling, pouring, spraying, and more. Clashing together mixed paint languages comes from my endeavor to replicate the way life feels.”
Impatience
ENIGMA by Marguerite Wibaux is an unfettered painting of a delicate brown egg. Waiting for food to cook is one of the most painful kinds of waiting for me. More than waiting for a first date to arrive, more than waiting for test results (of any sort), more than waiting for a loved one to return. Because of this impatience, I can never seem to gauge the right amount of time to boil an egg. Either (most often) it is wildly undercooked, or when the waiting becomes too much and I walk away, the eggs turn out like little balls of rubber.
About her practice Wibaux writes: “Convinced there is more to learn in the subjective, affective, imaginary perception we have of the world than in its objective form, Marguerite brings objects out of their contexts, plays with scales, and simply portrays them. Her vivid and striking works look like a statement but in fact, they are an interrogation, challenging our representation and how we are so used to seeing things.”
Going...Somewhere...
There is a vague sense of anticipation in Taxi Stand in Brooklyn by artist Silas Borsos. The bay of taxi cabs wait patiently to be hailed. They’re the large ones, the vans that you take to the airport with all of your luggage. En route to somewhere else, they imply a destination is on the horizon. The image is sunny and full of anticipatory energy, like the kind of hopeful anxiety one gets while waiting to board a flight. The taxis in this painting represent an inanimate representation of Barthes’s observation: “Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.” This is not unlike how I feel when I’m waiting for a loved one to arrive at the bar, or pick me up from the train. I have received orders not to move.
In Storage
This painting by artist Mathew Tucker, titled Storage Rack, makes me think of all the paintings in storage that will never see the light of day. I once had the pleasure of visiting a museum’s offsite storage facility, and throughout the tour, all I could think about was the hundreds of works of art sitting passively in the racks, that might not be exhibited for years, or perhaps ever again. The works in this painting are also waiting patiently to be shown, echoing Barthes’s remark that often waiting can be a futile exercise.
Lounging Around
The shape, the aesthetic, of waiting has long been a popular subject in art. Thousands of nudes in various stages of waiting adorn the walls of museums the world over. They recline, ponder, exalt in their waiting, often some combination of listless, forlorn, contemplative, or sensual. Artist Melanie Reese puts her work in conversation with this history of waiting with her pen on paper portraits. In particular Sarah no. 2 encapsulates what Barthes describes as the “matteness” of waiting - not pure apprehension or ennui, but somewhere in the middle. A dullness that is not entirely undesirable, because something is coming. Emphasizing lines and edges, the figure in Reese’s work lounges belly-down on a big, plush bed. Here waiting is a comfortable, serene, it is its own event.
Taking the Back Seat
This painting, titled Dashboard, by artist Sylvie Mayer, has a distinctly vintage quality to it. Perhaps because of the rich, muted colors, or the perspective, which situates the viewer in the back seat. This reminds me of all the times spent waiting in the back seat of the car while my mother would run errands. I feel like a child when I look at this painting, impatiently waiting for my mother to finish grocery shopping, mildly anxious that she may never return as the minutes ticked away. To pass the time, I would fixate on the anatomy of our car’s interior, tracing the air vents with my fingertips, tampering with the rear-view mirror, sometimes daring myself to move the gear shift just an inch as if to summon my mother from her task. In those moments waiting was a game.
Mayer states that her work, “is informed by transitions; the last days of fall when the leaves barely hang on to the trees, the moment of reaching a hand out to give or receive, the passageways and thresholds that mark our lives as we navigate aging. She paints moments that serve as turning points, capturing the implied possibility that something is about to happen.”
Sometimes I get stuck in one of my dreams and it feels like a kind of waiting. Immobile. Barthes says waiting is a delirium, a hallucination. When I am waiting I am not of this world, I can step out of it and watch myself waiting.
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.