Review

Talking with Jonah Criswell about Reside

Jonah Criswell, dyptich detail (left) of "We Are Home," oil on canvas, 72" x 72" (dyptich 144" x 72"), 2008. Image: courtesy of the artist and gallery

Reside functions as a two-part exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jonah Criswell, in which Criswell continues an ongoing tradition of documenting the everyday through a reexamination of the domestic setting. The exhibition is on view at Cocoon Gallery, September 3 through 24, 2010.

Avoiding common associations with comfort and stability, Criswell navigates between unexpected compositions, murky and brooding pallets, and an ever-present sense that these familiar spaces contain more unfamiliar truths about human experience. Paintings of rooms strewn with evidence of inhabitation suggest states of tension and anxiety through off-kilter compositions and a fractured sense of time. Graphite descriptions of the most banal home listings flicker between coming and going, revealing potential intimacies, and simultaneous states of “hello” and “goodbye." In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Criswell explores the home as both inhabited and vacated, and he depicts it as a richly layered site in which all aspects of human experience can be traversed.

The works featured in Reside explore the complexity of the home and challenge the notion of the domestic setting as common or banal by directly addressing nuances in seemingly ordinary spaces. Common associations with comfort and familiarity are inverted as spaces become charged with apparitions and traces of history and memory, while evidence of anxiety and discomfort reflect a contemporary shift in American cultural psychology. Each of these works highlights moments of transition, simultaneous states of coming and going, lending the viewer an opportunity to pause and experience parallel conditions of duration through line, color, and composition. Despite the permanent nature of the exhibition’s title, Reside, a temporary nature of daily experience is evident, suggesting the impossibility of the comfort and stability that comes with a state of permanence, perhaps revealing a very current fear in Americans across a broad scope of cultural and economic lines. As Criswell's studio-mate, I took some time to discuss this with him recently:

Erica Mahinay: I think I would like to begin by asking a little about your thoughts on the relationship between your medium and your subject. What do you think happens to a space when you use paint vs. drawing?

Jonah Criswell: Painting feels more concrete, based on how I draw, which involves layers and layers of marks. Painting seems to be more assertive but drawing holds, for me, a lot more mood. The larger paintings have a lot of force and really feel like joined shapes of spaces where the drawings have a strong sense of grid that underlies everything. Drawing for me is so much about showing the difficulty in finding, something like mystery.

EM: Through a process of mark-making you mean?

JC: I think the process of mark-making is a by-product of trying to understand your subject. Some people make the process the subject, which is fine, but I am mostly responding to something I found compelling. The subject, its representation, is a general destination, the mark-making is mostly the vehicle to that destination — but those layers are about the difficulty or ease of that transition from an image in the world, in my mind and then on paper.

EM: Can you elaborate a little about the decision-making process? What happens when you translate a source photograph into paint or graphite? What associations become activated in this translation?

JC: I think it mostly reflects something like nostalgia or memory. I usually choose an image that feels beautiful or haunting or lovely — something unnamable to it. When I translate it into paint, I usually focus on how the source material seemed more dramatic, drama being the rhythmus of a kind of emotional experience. Usually the things that I emphasize are born out of the relationship I develop with the image or the changes the image undertakes just by being around. Printouts have a tendency to change subtly over time. Mostly though, the emphasis or de-emphasis of certain passages comes from trying to find a way to give the viewer that same electric feeling — without trying to just lay it on thick; sometimes you need to slow someone down so that when the work reveals its agenda to the viewer, there is no going back. This is highly dependent on the viewer.

EM: Do you think the content of the familiar tends to disarm your viewer then?

JC: Oh, hopefully! I think that there is an expectation of what exists in a gallery setting …. Representational paintings do this, abstract paintings do that, performative pieces do these things — What would happen if you walked into a gallery filled with photographs and drawings that felt like they were from your life? Would you then see life as ceremonial or worthy of something more than just memory? Life feels ceremonial, and the world feels regal, but there is a danger, like the angry mob at the gates of what you think of as precious. I want that danger in there, because I want the viewers to defend the work.

EM: I think that some of your works, particularly the ones using Craig’s-listed and advertised source image ‘homes for rent’ flirt with the notion of the voyeur, but in a way that springs from socially acceptable means of peeking, and with all the potential of having this place, which is not your home, become your home —

JC: Oh, certainly! Also the opposite is that they talk about the exhibitionistic character of our lives now.

EM: So do you think that by making a decision to use the 'banal' or the familiar as a subject, you in effect poke fun at the more outrageous things that are available for our Internet viewing?  Or is that beside the point?

JC: I think that the more outrageous things we can see on the Internet become sadly common. I was more interested in finding a depiction of places non-artist-type people would consider moving to. In the paintings, one of the valid things I was told was that a lot of the austerity feels like an artist or designer's home — albeit a poor one, but an artist-type person. This, I think, shuts some people out because they would just compare their life to that of the author, me. By choosing already empty homes, I took me more out of the equation!

Jonah Criswell, "Home IV," oil on canvas, 72" x 72", 2007. Image: courtesy of the artist and gallery

EM: In these paintings, there is a very different sense of composition than in the drawings, which build a kind of anxiety; the drawings seem to tend towards a bleak calm. nNeither are very comforting, but are on opposite ends of discomfort. Can you talk about some of the intentions behind your notions of discomfort in the home?

JC: You are absolutely right about the compositional differences. The paintings were supposed to be almost doorways into rooms. Given that they are 6-foot and larger, I wanted the viewer to have to experience the painting almost as they would experience a room they walked into. The drawings have such a delicacy and nuance when you get close to them. I want to create a kind of intimacy with the viewer that ultimately reveals a sadder truth.

EM: Each of these works seem to be about moments that could simultaneously be coming or going, but at different speeds and for different durations. Do you think about pace during the making process?

JC: Mostly as a compositional feature. Also, I think about pacing during the installation of the work. I am so scattered personally that it naturally happens when I make a work that is very energetic, I naturally make something quieter after that.

EM: The empty house drawings seem to take on an element of permanence despite depicting a transitional moment — moving in/moving out. Through the mark-making there is evidence of a thought-out decision-making process that implies this longer duration of time, while the paintings seem like a more immediate moment — like entering a room, which makes me think some of this has to do with medium as well as composition?

JC: Certainly, my paintings usually work to place color as a surrogate for emotion and emotional states, whereas my drawings push mark-making and mood to the foreground. You are also right in how the paintings seem more about living, whereas the drawings focus on that permanence and transitional character of being. For me, I thought a lot about how — and this is sappy — the way we arrange our homes and lives is like an exhibition, but there is that quiet pause between them, the death and birth of a space is subject to the same existential conflicts as a person's life.

EM: In your editing process while setting up this exhibition, what did you think about in terms of pace? What do you consider when deciding how much to give the viewer and how much to leave out?

JC: Well, I wanted to present my best work, naturally, but I felt that the paintings and drawings counterpoint themselves well. The drawings become places for viewers to "rest" with all of the rambunctious color and compositional things going on, whereas the gloomy character of those drawings pushes people out to the more aggressive but lively paintings. I didn't want anything too small, though. This forces people to orient themselves to the smaller works, which are still large, 36 inches by 51 inches, as a standard of a kind of intimacy.

-re-

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