2020 January Resident Interview: Jodi Hays
MHM: Much of your practice has been beautifully documented and catalogued throughout your career. In what ways does this creative record illuminate throughlines within your work?
JH: I have always relied heavily on daily practice, most consistently through sketchbooks. They have been a familiar container for over 25 years. The interest in artist books came for a few reasons; to honor the book form (as reading is another important part of my research), and in some cases, like Keeper (collaborators David King and writer Joe Nolan) I hoped to have a desirable, affordable component to my solo show of paintings.
Most recent books (on my site) are like recipe books, a context for my abstraction. I have divided these up into categories that have been consistent prompts: fragments, build, heaven, text. I made them as poetic (and affordable) extensions of and illuminations on my practice.
MHM: What are you reading right now? Could you describe any particular passages or themes that resonate with your current time in studio?
JH: I have been reading CD Wright’s poetry this winter. She is also a native of Arkansas. Steal Away and One with Others. I feel understood.
Ninth Street Women, reading with a few women artists for a book club.
In the fall I picked up White Girls by Hilton Als and read the essay on Flannery O’Connor called The Lonesome Place. I am still ruminating on how this essay begins to get at the frayed edges of a southern identity or habit, and the role of the writer/observer.
Others in rotation now: Spying on the South, Water Dancer, and stacks of books of poetry that are overdue but I’m glad our library no longer has fines.
See full interview. My studio is in my backyard, so I was able to manifest an uptick in production. My time, though not by any stretch “free,” was immersive, my practice seasoned and I enjoyed some unexpectedly large gains with materials, paper, and fabric.
Review, Nashville Scene
Hays’ grid softens even more with the fabric elements that compose several of her artworks. In these pieces, fabric wraps around the edge of the canvas, which Hays’ paint does not. Fabric as a historically feminine material is, once again, a tradition that Hays plays into. It’s rather impossible to avoid nostalgia when using materials that are found, like worn pajamas or patchwork quilts. Within the context of Hays’ own history, she is calling upon a small-town tradition of reusing and thrifting — in one of the works, fabric from Hays’ grandmother’s curtains peeks through. The seam of literal sewn edges is mirrored in nearby strokes of paint, emboldening the more organic shapes and calling to mind the vision of a woman poring over her craft. Several of the pieces’ names invoke this tradition as well, such as that of one of the most visually dynamic works, “Hem.” Its title suggests both an edge of clothing as well as restrictions, rules, the scaffolding that Hays plays within.
Art making at its core is a form of problem-solving; in “God Sees Through Houses,” Hays is trying to answer the question of why art now for herself, in the face of not only political but personal turmoil. Much like “Keeper,” the artist’s 2017 solo show at Nashville’s Red Arrow Gallery, “God Sees Through Houses” finds Hays reexamining her decades-long painting practice as a whole. It’s as if, in these exhibitions, Hays admits that she can no longer indiscriminately pull architecture, symbols, and figures from the wider world. She must wrestle with their original context and the charged associations that can accompany them. In my eyes, this marks a breakthrough for the artist.
To get back to Guston, Hays has sold me on the idea that it’s possible to think of painting as resistance. Making art during uncertain times is an act of faith, of hope that we can do better and that we can influence the arc of justice, in however small a way. In a conversation I had with Hays for BURNAWAY last year, she said, “ . . . making your small mark in the midst of a larger world fraught with decay or cynicism––that’s hopeful.” So is making a daily commitment to being a good neighbor, and trying again if we fail.
Nashville-based artist Jodi Hays usually moves among several paintings in her studio practice, a habit that may be responsible for echoes across her body of work. Yet each painting stands on its own as bold and intense, a carefully wrought yet experimental playing with composition and form. I’ve long been drawn to Hays’ paintings, which are rendered with palette knives, tape, and other exacting tools. I sometimes read them as abstract cityscapes, full of sharp angles, architectural forms, and geometrical shapes. She envisions herself as part of the lineage of painting and is moved to investigate restraint and abandon by slipping between abstraction and representation. She implies fences and walls as metaphors for the limits of physical and psychological spaces.
But there is also something very human in this work that speaks to our relationships with our immediate environments. The screen-like stripes and overlaid grids act as borders, actual and metaphorical, in modern life. Hays’ paintings have an internal logic that I could study for years. This speaks to her striking instinct for composition that’s magnified by her disciplined practice, but also to her sharp, critical mind.
Last year, Hays opened a pop-up gallery in her backyard studio called DADU (short for Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit, the city code name for structures on one’s property). I visited the unit in between DADU exhibitions to talk to Hays about her new series called The Devil’s Neighbor.
Jodi Hays works in a studio on the third floor in an old mission church. The dark, spooky hallways are filled with old furniture (and probably ghosts), but her workspace is warm and sunny—and the rent is only fifty bucks(!) I loved Hays’s paintings, particularly the surfaces, the degree of abstraction, her choice of imagery, and her sense of color. We talked a little about her artist statement, too. Here’s my edit: Depicting construction fences, festoons, caution tape, and traffic cones that mark transitional sites, Hays’s paintings use visual metaphor to explore personal circumstance.
Jodi Hays' art is an exercise in balance and juxtaposition, the influence of her vibrant abstract paintings shifting between natural landscapes and built environments and her approach alternating between discipline and spontaneity. Filled with vivid pops of color and incorporating grids and iconography, Jodi's work draws inspiration from her upbringing near a national park, her adult years in bigger cities like Boston and Nashville, and an assortment of literature, images, sound bites and titles that move her.
"For years, my work has been a negotiation of restraint and abandon," she says. "Painting is an investment in constraint in a similar way that architecture bends and works within our complex landscapes and cultural matrix."
Using brushes, palette knives and tape, often scraping paint to reveal the layers underneath, Jodi creates textured works that play with shape and space. Her East Nashville studio is filled with arresting canvases of all sizes in various states of completion, and her art is included in collections of the J. Crew Company in New York, Gordon College in Massachusetts, the Nashville International Airport and the Tennessee State Museum.