Aug 25th, 2020 • 7 minute read
Share
The Weekly Curation: Meditations on the Grid
Click/tap below to copy url
This week we have a special curation with curator and Art in Res artist, Jordan Holms. Jordan's artwork has been exhibited in many wonderful shows, including our Weekly Curation: Summer Sun!, and she has curated a number of exhibitions (make sure to check out her bio below). We are so thrilled to welcome Jordan Holms to our curatorial team! Enjoy this week's thought provoking curation and keep an eye out for more of her gorgeous curations to come!
This week, Jordan Holms takes a look at the various ways in which artists interpret the grid and represent it in their work through painting, watercolor, and collage. From bucolic red bricks to neon networks, mixed media matrixes, and even “non-grid” grids, each work takes a unique approach to meditating on the grid.
The Familiar Grid
Charis Ammon’s painting, Suggestion, takes on a very familiar sort of grid: brick paving blocks. This painting is a slow burn –– it takes a moment as your eyes pass over the composition to appreciate how much care is put into crafting each individual brick. The painting suggests a quaint cottage or French villa lingering just out of view. The soft light cast across the bricks complicates the gridded composition and reminds me of how hot red bricks feel underfoot on a warm summer afternoon.
Charis Ammon has been curious for as long as she can remember. She received a BFA in Painting at Texas State University in San Marcos in 2015 and an MFA in Painting at the University of Houston in 2018. Ammon is now represented at Inman Gallery in Houston as of September 2019. She is now living, working, and painting in Queens.
The Grid as Chaos
The chaos in Sara Galkin’s painting, In Pain There is Beauty, is untenable. It’s as if the vibrant marks are about ready to launch themselves right off of the canvas. In this work the grid anchors the artist’s marks (however futile this may be). In vain, the grid attempts to contain the wild strokes of red and green. While the yellows are less petulant and remain in their compartments.
Sara Guryan Galkin, aka gUrsLa, lives with her husband and 3 children in Brooklyn, NY. She is an abstract painter, exhibiting artist and teacher. Her approach to teaching centers around making mistakes, being present and placing value on the frustration of not knowing.
The Methodical Grid
What is so striking about Rebecca Kaufman’s painting, Pre-Experience is that the work is somehow incredibly complex and perfectly simple all at once. At a glance, it is a succinct and thoughtful abstract examination of the grid. But linger a little longer and the methodically planned layers begin to reveal themselves. A nod to Agnes Martin’s infamously rigid grids, here the artist makes this timeless subject matter her own by arranging her lattices into a cheekily off-kilter composition.
Rebecca Kaufman’s paintings address the autonomy of perception using the ancient technology of painting to reflect on the addictive visual technologies that we rely so heavily upon today. She earned a BFA from the University of Tennessee and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Kaufman has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco and The Fourth Wall Gallery in Oakland. She currently lives and works in San Francisco teaching art to kids and adults and volunteering at Root Division, a nonprofit arts organization.
The Grid Alternative
Vincent Pomilio’s When Pink Overcame Green takes an alternative approach to the grid. Although no actual grid exists in this work –– its presence is felt nonetheless. Each asymmetrical pink form seems to exist alone in its loosely designated compartment. However, the title suggests that the pinks may slowly be growing larger and overtaking the composition. The narrative the artist evokes with the title of the work suggests that some sort of passive-aggressive battle between the fleshy pink and candied green is underway –– we have arrived just as the pinks begin to take over their green counterparts.
Vincent Pomilio lives and works both in New York City and Hudson, NY. The artist works in all paint media and lately has developed a technique using pigmented plaster and wax - his version of fresco painting. HIs work has been widely shown in the United States and in Europe, as well as included in many private and public collections.
The Power Grid
Dan Bina’s Ringlinger is the embodiment of “power-clashing.” Teal grids wrestle for attention with orange tiger stripes, while Pepto-bismol pink diagonals slice through electric greens and yellows. In this painting, the grid does not anchor or contain the composition –– it gives it permission to go completely awry (in the best sense of the word). Ringlinger is uninhibited, packed with energy and a daring combination of color and pattern.
Dan Bina lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied Fine Art at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, and Kansas City Art Institute earning a B.F.A. in 2006. Dan's work addresses themes of identity, media, culture, gender, and commerce. He examines social media, human desire, and the advertising languages that market individuals, products, and ideas.
The Grid as Space
Susain Stainman’s mixed media collage Blindly employs the grid in a much different way than the more abstract works in this curation. Pulling the grid out of abstraction, the artist firmly plants it in a representative context. Here, the grid is a real space; apartments stacked on top of one another like paint chips at Home Depot. A snapshot of how compact, contained, and yet precarious, the built environment can be, underscored by the freedom and laissez-faire attitudes of the bodies and forms that create a halo around the gridded center.
Susan Stainman is an interdisciplinary artist, focusing on sculpture, installation, and social practice. She is a graduate of Brown University with a degree in American Studies and the Slade School of Fine Art in London for Sculpture. The artist has had solo exhibitions at AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, Point of Contact, Lock Haven University and Black and Graze in New York City. Her work is held in universities and private collections nationally and internationally. Stainman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
The Grid as Order
Although this bright and languid watercolor painting from artist Sam Schonzeit doesn’t make use of any grid in the traditional sense, you can still sense its presence in the orderly arrangement of geometric forms. Each a-symmetrical shape stagnates in space, hovering equidistant from all the adjacent forms. It’s as if each individual element is contained by invisible sets of walls –– each shape given a room of its own. Simultaneously rigid in composition, and luxurious in color and form, this watercolor makes exceptional use of the non-grid.
Born 1972, New York City, Sam Schonzeit has degrees in religious studies and architecture and both of these disciplines inform his work. Born and raised in New York, his father is Photorealist, Ben Schonzeit. He has shown his work internationally, most recently in Stockholm where he lived for two years. Now his studio is in several rooms in a warren of an old house in Marfa. From one of these rooms he can gaze out over ranchland and up to Mount Livermore, the fifth highest peak in Texas (8,378ft).
The Gleeful Grid
In Harmoniums, artist Katie Curry deploys the ever-so traditional grid in a decidedly un-traditional format. Her a-symmetrically shaped canvas gives the matrices that weave in amongst the composition a different edge (literally). With its bursts of color and texture Curry’s painting is gleeful and animated. Here, the grid functions as a foil –– enhancing the surrounding exuberant forms, as they vibrate with energy and emotion.
Katie Curry lives and works in San Francisco, CA where she received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2019. Her work explores the intersection of drawing, painting, and sculpture. She is interested in the historical constraints and dogmatic modes of representation that constitute these disciplines.
Bringing it Together
This week's curation brings together a collection of Art in Res pieces that consider the grid as a compositional and conceptual tool. The grid evokes many different connotations, memories, and feelings. For some it may symbolize order, logic, and consistency, while for others it may indicate confinement or containment. For others still, the grid is in of itself a reason to break free and run wild.
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.
Curation by Jordan HolmsVirtual installations courtesy of ArtPlacer