Jordan Holms, Itinerant Summer

Jordan Holms is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, and sculpture. Her practice considers how aesthetic ‘tastes’ are materialized, organized, and made to mean. Mining source materials from the built environment (both physical and online) Holms’s work references commodity culture, folk art, antiques, reality television, boutique concept stores, and so-called aspirational design accounts on social media. Holms’s work addresses how material cultural capital takes shape in the wake of the suburbanization and homogenization of social media advertising. Filtered through the lens of abstraction, her work interprets the things we find in our homes and in the built environment that signal something about how taste produces meaning. Holms constructs irreverent and errant spaces that index their own meanings in an attempt to make sense of what ‘having taste’ might look like in a moment wherein aesthetic trends are dictated by algorithms as well as elites.

In a new body of work, Holms considers, from an aesthetic vantage, the ongoing housing crisis in major cities across the globe. We are inundated daily by media stories of extreme poverty and extreme 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, which Holms has experienced and witnessed amongst her contemporaries in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, and London. 

This series of paintings reference from memories of all of the places Holms called ‘home’ in 2023, 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, intended to feel as if they could easily be picked up and carried onto the next home. 

Jordan Holms has exhibited in the UK, the US, 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.