Experimenting with the Self
Dear Grand Rapids, keep creating and experimenting because you’ll never know what you’ll discover. The UICA’s exhibit, “The Jump Off,” shows us where experimentation can take us.
A special show opened earlier this month at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA). “The Jump Off,” curated by UICA’s Exhibitions Curator Heather Duffy, shares a pivotal moment in several artists’ bodies of work. This moment is the jump off, or the “clear turning point that catalyzes the spark for their new work’s materials, visual or conceptual content.”
Exemplified through a grouping of an artist’s earlier artwork with a more current artwork, we’re given an opportunity to see the creative process of an artist’s practice.
One of the largest artworks in scale to exhibit the effect of this moment was created by Nathan Margoni in 2017. “Butterfly,” an acrylic and mixed media piece on canvas, is a self-portrait that eerily floats above the viewer at a pitched angle. The artist arrived at a focus on the head and ears after creating a series of intaglio prints, also on display. “Creature #3” from 2005 depicts a smaller scaled figure which, as the artist’s statement reads, “has its own narrative that is far more powerful and universal than mine.” As Margoni’s subject matter focused on more specific body parts and his material choices changed, it’s fascinating to see the style of the individual marks on the surface stay consistent, like my handwriting has stayed consistent for the last two decades of my life.
Some moments are not as obvious but its impact is still felt. In Scott Dickson’s “Failure Formation, Mummy Flats” from 2013, we see a paper collage of salt flats. Within a year, Dickson created “It Was At These Places That We Understood” in 2014.
“After completing a large collection of small and immediate pieces solely from postcards, I felt that I was holding too tightly to their imagery and nostalgic qualities,” he writes. His experimentation with “glittered, reflective, and holographic papers” then informed his newer work while keeping his signature symmetrical geometry.
The text accompanying the artwork in this exhibition is extraordinarily useful in deciphering the creative process. In two seemingly identical paintings from 2015, Melissa Dorn Richards experienced a jump off between “Mop” and “Mop VIII.”
“I really start to get into the texture that will become the predominant force in the series,” says Dorn Richards. The relationship she developed with her material and the choices she began to make really exhibit the creative process at its finest. Her subject matter of a simple mop is described in new ways during a process of creative production.
When I was an art student at Carnegie Mellon University from 2001 to 2005, I was also a brother of the Theta Xi fraternity. My experiences within the brotherhood influenced my own art practice so dramatically that I created my own fictional brotherhood known as the Society of 23.
I mention this jump off of my own because during this time, I also deejayed music at our fraternity parties. One popular song I played in 2003 was “The Jump Off” by Lil’ Kim. While “the jump off” is a nod to her return to music with her third album, “La Bella Maffia,” after a brief hiatus (“I been gone for a minute now I’m back at the jump off”), the term “jump off” is also slang for “a sexual partner who is more than a one-night stand but with whom one does not intend to form a long-term romantic relationship.”
This relationship can be analogous to the artist and his or her own relationship to material and content. Each artist in this show at the UICA will continue to have exciting and informative moments that will lead to the next great work of art in their artistic practice, but which ones will be long-term and which one will be one-night stands is unknown. For now, we have the pleasure of seeing just one of these many jump offs at the UICA’s current show, open through August 26.
