Jordan Holms, Itinerant Summer
Itinerant Summer, a new exhibition by London-based artist Jordan Holms, opens September 3, 2024 at Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, CA. The exhibition features new small and large scale paintings by the artist until September 28, 2024. An open house will be held on September 14, from 1-4 pm. More information about the exhibition can be found at: https://www.marrowgallery.com
We are inundated daily by media stories of extreme poverty and privilege, but we don’t as often hear or see stories about everyone caught in between; those who are less visibly struggling to secure basic necessities tend to get lost amongst more sensationalized stories. There is, in particular, a lack of visibility around artists experiencing varying degrees of housing insecurity. In this new body of paintings, Jordan Holms considers, from an aesthetic vantage, the ongoing housing crisis in London.
In the summer of 2023 Holms was illegally evicted in the middle of the night from her South London home. Due to the highly competitive rental market in London, she spent the next four months couch surfing, house sitting, and living out of her studio while searching for secure housing. As a means of representation for these more nuanced instances of displacement, this series of paintings reference from memory the places Holms called ‘home’ during her search for permanent housing. Embracing a keen sense for architecture and design that ranges across low and highbrow referents, these paintings translate the stylistic and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the spaces Holms inhabited into abstract paintings. Tethered together by the artist’s fundamental interests in pattern, color, texture, and form, these paintings are all of portable sizes, as if they could easily be picked up and carried onto the next home. That said, this exhibition considers the question: Where are you meant to go when you get priced out of your own home?
Jordan Holms is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, and sculpture. Holms has exhibited in the US, the UK, and Canada, and her work is held in multiple private collections. She has participated in solo exhibitions at Marrow Gallery (2020; 2018), and group exhibitions at Voss Gallery (2023), the de Young Museum (2020), and SFMOMA Artists Gallery (2019). She has attended residencies at the Icelandic Textile Center (2022) and Vermont Studio Center (2020). Holms earned a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2019). She currently lives and works in South London, UK.