February 2021
Images Courtesy of Alex Nuñez
Words by Yadira Capaz
This February the walls of the Fountainhead home are almost running out of space. Two painters from New York and a sculptor from Pennsylvania who makes “painting-shaped objects” have been focused on making new works in between the field trips and guest visits that define the Fountainhead Residency’s uniquely social experience. The mood among these three young artists is very introspective, in stark contrast to the pressure on many Contemporary artists to make art that is a statement about the world. Instead, they present us with pieces that reflect their own meditations, but don’t reveal too much so that the viewer may have their own conversation with the art. Each month audiences are invited into their world through an Open House and a Virtual Studio Visit not only to see their work, but to also talk to the artists about it.
“There’s pleasure, play, and inspiration in just making paintings because it is what I like to do. My subject matter being me trying to understand myself is a beautiful freedom that I have,” says Jade Thacker. Her paintings are vibrant and surreal, full of figures and symbols that morph into ever more nuanced visions, layered with meaning just beyond words but deeply felt.
Blair Whiteford says “I don’t want to be just be one thing. That would be too simplifying. I don’t make work about anything. I just paint. I don’t have an artist statement. I make paintings about what I think about the most. Right now that’s grand Biblical themes like Deluge (flood) and Katabasis (the descent into hell).” He has developed a recognizable dream-like style for his current series exploring various scenes acted out by fluid, hazy, uncanny figures.
Justin Emmanuel Dumas makes highly-textured abstract sculptures with objects arranged in satisfying aesthetic harmonies that create order from the chaos of history through the shape of paintings. His poetic words complete the works and bring them to life: “Surfaces have a great memory. Scratches, abrasions, and even wounds are gestural and do add up to a narrative that you can read if you are willing to engage with them. While I’m filling them up with my own memories and ideas and having my own personal meditative experience with them, I do want to leave enough space for the viewer to fill them with their own meditations, their own history. That way they can be about excavating a public memory, what slips between the cracks, to tell a more complete story of what’s happening and taking place.”
Spending the larger part of January and February in Miami is a big deal for these artists from the Northeast, and they’ve been making it a point to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible whether than means the beach or kayaking or letting in sunlight in the garage studio. “Miami is wonderful right now in comparison to everywhere else in the country in terms of the weather. It’s really nice to be here,” Jade admits. The impact of place makes its way subtly into their works. For Blair, there’s a clear influence: “These paintings are a little bit brighter than usual. Probably influenced by the sunshine from working in the garage. I put a lot of ocean in my paintings already. These have strong horizon lines.” In one of their water adventures kayaking around the islands of Biscayne Bay, Justin found a rusted motor with seashells attached to it that had probably been tumbling in the bay for about 20 years. “The kind of thing that could only exist from the process that made it,” he declares with delight, and says he plans to incorporate it into a future piece.
The Fountainhead Residency offers artists ample time to make work, opportunity to connect with nature, an abundance of experiences in Miami’s art ecosystem with introductions to its various community members, but it’s always the time spent bonding with fellow residents that stands out in their hearts. As Blair says, “I’ve had fun talking to these two. They’re really great artists. A lot of good conversations. I feel like we’re on the same page about a lot of stuff. We’ve been watching films together every night. We’re able to talk about things on the same frequency with one another.”
By the end of her time at the Fountainhead Residency, Jade Thacker had two new fully finished medium-sized paintings hanging on the walls. They are not the kind of paintings you can understand with a glimpse. There is a clear style, but the meaning is elusive and the feelings they provoke are intimately poignant. The paintings invite you to look closely as they deepen with nuance the longer you look. “There is no explaining, it’s you and the work, which lends to meditation,” Jade declares. Both paintings emphasize a central figure, and alternate between broad strokes suggestive of movement and detailed scenes that blend the background into the foreground. She shares that she always uses herself as the figure, but you would not necessarily recognize her physically in the paintings. Jade is a visual thinker and her painting practice is a way for her to understand herself. “I am the most excited when I am making things and I come to a conclusion about myself,” she affirms, clear about her purpose in engaging with her practice.
Jade’s creative process is highly intuitive. “I don’t come up with a dissertation and then make pieces. I go with what makes sense to me visually, it’s an honest conversation I am having with myself, and sometimes it’s not possible to articulate that in specific terms,” she says. One of the paintings features a figure with a haunting gaze next to a slot machine almost striking triple sevens. She stops short of explaining the symbolism of specifics and instead hints about the themes influencing the work: “I am thinking about myself and my body and when I feel comfortable or uncomfortable, when I feel powerful or beautiful or not, when I feel all of those things in different settings. It’s not an obvious or literal thing.”
Across the wall of the garage, the other painting is framed like a portrait in which each aspect of the face is fully abstracted. “I just like exploring the idea of things not being certain, things not being one thing necessarily, things turning into other things, things overlapping other things,” she says, and though it sounds philosophical, when you look again these seeming metaphors become quite literal in her technique. She is playful with her medium and is pulling off many sophisticated maneuvers which boast her understanding of layers and perspective, both technical and psychological.
It takes many years of training and self-exploration to develop such a clear style and personal creative practice. When asked, she points to historic artists like Francis Bacon and Wilfredo Lam as major influences. “I try not to look to other people too much, it starts to feel unnatural, the opposite of having an honest conversation,” she says. Jade Thacker is originally from Boston, Massachusetts and earned her BFA in printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014. Currently she is based out of Brooklyn, New York, and in 2020 had a successful first solo show, “Embarrassment Safe Word,” at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea.
Blair Whiteford’s current series of paintings of abstracted figures is sensuous, fluid, and dream-like. How he found his way to this style is full of charming inner contradictions. He shares vulnerably, yet in a casual tone, that he had a lot of resistance in becoming a painter: “I started off as a sculptor. I really hated painting, but I really hated that I loved it. People used the word intuition and it always offended me. I wanted to make cerebral academic art. But then I started painting and I really loved it. And maybe it’s okay to do what you like to do.” This resistance to intuition and desire for more structured thinking finds a balance in his prolific output now that he has honed his technique into a replicable style. He explains, “The paintings are probably less intuitive than they seem. I have a vocabulary. It’s a technical execution for me. Those small choices I guess might be intuition, but it’s more like a skill. I am starting to enter a point in my career that I know what I’m doing now. All the choices are up to me.”
The way Blair blends colors into endless curves creates luminous auras that give his paintings an ethereal, even fantastical quality. Yet he says, “I’m not very spiritual, ironically.” He is surrounded by six paintings he made in his studio during the residency, two of each size ranging from small to large. Some depict a clear scene like a figure meditating by the sea, or a vampire drawing out energy from a resting figure. Others are more aesthetic, abstracted explorations of the style he has developed and depict clustered figures. These clusters are in stark contrast to the social-distancing that is the norm during the COVID-19 pandemic. He admits he had felt very distant from people while in New York City and coming to Miami for this very social residency involved more closeness than he had before.
He refrains from putting words to his paintings or his style, and declares that “If language was that articulate, I wouldn’t be making paintings.” Instead he reflects on the way much of his work is “extralinguistic.” He says, “There is a slippage in language, and these pieces are like a mixture of language and affect, the dialogue between recognizable forms and style is like what’s between the word and the stylization.” He is exploring uniquely stylized figures in these paintings. He reserves his use of words for titling works or exhibitions which he sees as a poetic practice separate from the paintings. For example, while at the Fountainhead Residency, he had a solo show up in Jack Barret Gallery in New York titled “Sowing a Seed in a Field Made of Ash.” Blair has recently finished his MFA at Yale and is focused on keeping the pace of building his art career by making more pieces in his unique style.
The style Blair has developed is a vehicle to express his coded meditations on philosophy and the world. While in Miami he has been reflecting on the Bible and God, the Flood and Descent into Hell, not because he identifies with Christianity on a personal level but because he sees biblical narrative as political parallel. “I explore these existential questions in theological territory. The apocalyptic is a consistent echo in history. People are always obsessed about the end of the world. I’m interested in God because I’m interested in floods, and climate change as proof of God,” he says. ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy’ by Graham Harman laid on his desk, and he raved about the fantastical sci-fi visions of Lovecraft as inspiration alongside an eclectic mix of 19th century Romantic paintings, Gothic novels, and psychoanalysis. Theories by postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari stood out to him: “I like their ideas about schizophrenia and the endless loop of the human mind. There’s an infinite loop in every person’s comprehension.” Perhaps using the word loops instead of curves to describe the linework in his paintings offers a key to looking at his work. For now, he plans to show these paintings in an upcoming exhibition, and dreams of collaborating with a director to create the style of a film.
The studio of Justin Emmanuel Dumas overflows with mundane materials of various sizes and textures, though united by a very organic color palette of tan, brown, beige and the occasional rusty red and military green. There are objects on the floor, on the tables, sometimes even below the art hanging on the walls. There is a sense that all these things at any moment could be put together in a new way. Yet the pieces on the wall always look polished, intentional, aesthetically immaculate while simultaneously exemplifying the Japanese Wabi-Sabi philosophy of impermanence and imperfection. The pieces hanging are technically sculptures in the shape of paintings. “Painting-shaped objects,” he calls them. “Even though they’re sculptural, I like to think I am contributing to a history of painting. Interrogating and redefining what painting can be if the forms were abstracted and abnormal.” He has fun finding new ways to arrange objects into balanced compositions by playing with the possibilities of through, behind, and in between in surprising new ways.
Justin’s art is sensuous at first sight, but there is a richness to the language he gives them that transforms the experience. Some people overflow with poetic insight and a depth of knowledge that only comes from thorough reading and genuine curious reflection. It is always such a pleasure to talk to artists who know how to enchant the listener when they talk about their work. Upon first glance, it might be hard to know how to engage his pieces, but hearing his philosophy about surface as memory is very enriching because then you can notice how the material processes openly express an accumulation of history, and how these gestures open the door to meditations on time and politics. He says, “I want to honor the marks that are left behind. I am leaning into these objects, allowing them to behave naturally, behave like an honest material would behave. As I shape them, I am hinting at a density and an interior space reflecting on time, history, and philosophy.” There is an emotional quality provoked by the textures and bound to the processes that is left up to the interpretation of the viewer. Yet Justin draws a line in interpreting too closely: “I don’t want to conflate my identity with the work because these parts of the work that are about me are between me and the work, and the parts that are about you are between you and the work.”
There is poetry that arises on accident when you pay attention. Hearing Justin describe with very specific words what is technically visually happening in his work is like hearing the casting of a spell, and can fill you with a wondrous magic of its own. For example, there is a piece that he describes as “Linen stitched to canvas with hemp rope around the bottom, coated with fish glue and marble dust, there is beeswax over this bookbinding mesh and a rusted iron door hinge with a remnant of the wooden door. My favorite moment is this line of marble dust that goes around it. It flattens it at certain angles.” He points to post-war artists Alberto Berri, Antoni Tapies, and Lucio Fontana as influence for his painting-shaped objects, and is currently reading ‘The Crossing the Visible’ by John McMarry to deepen his understanding of the phenomenology of painting to play with it later. He points to ‘Tell Them I Said No’ by Martin Herbert as a book that influenced his rebellious approach to keeping a mysterious persona in an era of publicity. “I don’t like to be photographed in front of my work. Or even on my social media, I don’t post pictures of my face very often. This is me trying to be careful so that whatever comes into my path is for the sake of the work, first and foremost,” he declares.
While he was in the residency Justin made his own sterling silver nails with a special clay-like material and a torch gun. He doesn’t know yet where he will put them, but delights in reflecting on adornment versus necessity, and the fun of finding ‘sterling silver nails’ in the description of an art work. Through the nails he is interested in the Biblical allusion to the crucifixion, and the story of the ‘The Doubting Thomas’ has become a way to understand his own work: “There’s this moment when Jesus was resurrected and Thomas was in disbelief. Jesus reached out his hand and let him feel the wound. In that moment, Thomas said ‘I believe now.’ I think these are the same way, where there’s a visceral quality to them, and you’re held in this tension between disbelief and wanting to touch and affirm your suspicions but not being able to, and that tension between the push and pull I think is what makes something otherworldly, compelling, mysterious, but you’re still initiated to understand what the mystery is.” Justin Emmanuel Dumas earned a BFA from Duquesne University in 2016, and continues to make work based out of his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.