Jeremiah Jossim’s newest body of work, Thresholds, ostensibly depicts the American landscape but it also hints at a history fraught with precarious relationships. These “landscape” paintings are as much about discrete, interior, personal spaces, as they are the exterior. They are full of intimate moments that draw the viewer in and inevitably lead to deeper questions about the human experience and our relationship with the land.

Lisa Jaye Young and Jeremiah Jossim share their thoughts about personal responsibility, art history, and the search for failure in order to discover new approaches to painting.

Lisa Jaye Young: It is a pleasure to talk with you about your work and to have a chance to meet you, Jeremiah. When Jon and Emily suggested it, I took one look at your paintings and the installation and thought, yes. I see not only a fresh and playful sense of pattern and color in your work, that's just a starting point, but an underlying dark side about our country’s relationships to “nature.” It’s a word that just feels so loaded today: whose nature, what is natural, questions of tourism and glamping, mining permits, water access, my head spins. It feels like it's all baked into your work.

Jeremiah Jossim: I am trying to hold onto it all: the needless dichotomy of us vs. nature or the more dangerous idea of human as steward, our country’s inability to recognize past injustices, let alone to apologize or initiate some type of reparation. And then within all that, is how uniquely heterogeneous the North American continent is, how it just blows you away at times with its utter brilliance.

LJY: For sure, the boundlessness. Despite sprawl, we still see glimpses. I did notice that our culture’s/our country’s failures (as in not enough progress and also utter failures like spills and deregulation, etc.), our failures with environmental stewardship, seem to be at the heart of your observations. When we met, you mentioned the term failure. What are the most prominent failures on your mind lately in relation to land use? And on a related note, are you finding ways to engage your work into direct conversation with creative forms of activism? Is this part of your practice?

JJ: I was thinking at first in the context of the paintings and how failure can be a powerful point of growth in the making of the work.

LJY: Hmm. I often think of failure as not failure, but as integral to a process, maybe that’s the teacher in me. So, what do you mean by failure in this case?

JJ: In the new paintings there is much more going on compared to the minimalism of Portents Along the Watershed. I started the new series hoping they might fail.

The idea of what failure can mean also makes me wonder about the use of it in the context of where I grew up in Jacksonville, FL. I don't consider it my home because it resembles nothing that I remember. It’s like a giant sand box turned over. I know that a group of activists have been trying to stop a highway interchange off I-95 near New Smyrna that threatens to destroy a vital part of the wetlands. There are still people who care and are trying to envision another path for the state that’s South of the South. It’s maddening that FL is one of the most bio-diverse states in the country and how it is being treated. In this current body of work I definitely see a turning away from the West to look closer to home. Lots of grass in these paintings and of course the pulp mill off of Brunswick features in one. More criticality is always vital.

LJY: The criticality seems to arrive in the form of glimpses of the mill, the highways. Sometimes a little cryptic: an extinct bird, a cigarette, the moon, but not in the sky – it’s on a Tarot deck instead. I see the persistence of the image embedded within the image in this new set of seven paintings. All of them move the eye back and forth between interior and exterior spaces, between the picture plane and a distant view, as if trying to establish a perspective. The glimpses in these arrive as squares within squares and open windows, window sills and picture frames, painted Polaroids, trompe l'oeil Post-It Notes, and vistas of poetry. It’s almost like a stacking of one’s consciousness. Am I getting warmer here?

JJ: I think what you are getting at is my view of criticality and the way I wish to communicate with the viewer.

It’s not always straightforward, as I am not the biggest fan of work that shouts its message in your face. I have always loved work that creeps its way into your head. I think of Rilke going to look at Cezanne's still-life’s every day during the fall of 1907, he kept coming back because he saw something new each time. That is what I'm striving for. I have not arrived there but I think it’s best to never really arrive as an artist. I was writing the other day and this is what I concluded with, “I layer my work; I hope you keep finding little details and hints, because I believe in the power of erosion as opposed to avalanches. I want to be the persistent drop of water that bores a hole in the stone."

LJY: I love this. I was just sharing Rilke’s experience in front of Cezanne’s work yesterday in class. What a bizarre coincidence. The layering in the work, but also the layered responses to what you see or notice. The way we connect with painting, the way that we produce meaning changes so much over our lifetimes, like when we return to a book or a painting or a poem. There is so much more to say here, but we only have so many pages. Where did you start with this series? Is there a plan or does it unfold?

JJ: I usually try to have a plan for a work but with these I just had a basic line drawing and as they are being constructed, I want them to change. I think you find something in that space. In Matisse’s work, for instance, you can see something in that slippage and layering. With these paintings, I hope through their development that I fail at certain points and have to problem-solve and in that exchange the works become something I could never plan or preconceive.

LJY: In terms of taking time and layering, you use oil. Oil paint is more forgiving and allows for more time and decision-making along the way. Can you say a little more about your current painting materials and process?

JJ: I work with oil paint primarily for its slow pace, but I've introduced oil sticks during this residency as an experiment. I do it really to frustrate myself. I find their bluntness foils my want for exactness. It’s a good obstacle. The strange thing about painting is there are a myriad of different languages within the medium. I started with abstraction and have moved towards representation without discarding abstraction, and it can be difficult to find the right blend, it’s a spectrum. The longer I've pursued paint the more the exchange of various painting vernaculars has fascinated me, the layering, the complexity. Although I do think one has to be careful of the danger of esoterism over specialization and losing the ability to communicate effectively.

LJY: You studied at SCAD (you graduated with a degree in Photography in 2010), and now you have a studio right on the Savannah River under the Talmadge Bridge as part of the SCAD Atelier program. Whole cities of consumer goods are coming past your window on city-scaled container ships, all day, and all night. How do you see this influence taking shape in your most recent body of work? What issues seem to emerge for you as most pressing? And a related question, to expand on this is perhaps: How do you see Savannah and its regional environmental issues differently than you did when you were here as a student some 17 years ago?

JJ: Yeah, it's wild watching those monsters swim by, some days around 5 or 6 will pass. The cargo ship and the tanker have been in my work for years now. I cannot think of a better image for globalism. I also watch a lot of the functions of the port, the cops, the loading and unloading, it’s been great research. The best answer I have for how Savannah has changed is that during my BFA in a documentary photo class with Zig Jackson, I documented a vacant lot that was for sale on President Street. It was a wild place: abandoned jet skis, old ruins, and then a group of people moved in there and were living in tents about halfway through my project (I did not photograph them). Now there are apartments on that piece of land. People need housing but I do have a feeling of a loss for spaces like that, where one could just wander in and collect weird stuff. It’s an essential need for artists, looking at the places no one glances at and all the amazing things people call trash.

LJY: We share an admiration for Zig’s work – connecting so deeply to the loss of space, people, entire cultures. So, with these influences in mind, can you say more about your current work? What titles are you tossing around for this latest body of work that you’re making during your eight week-long residency? What differentiates this new body of work from what you’ve done so far? Will the industrial detritus, open sky expanse, and looming bridge pylons wend their way into your compositions? I’d imagine this space, this “view” is so informative, the light, the river’s tidal and port activity. As part of this question, you’ve traveled and you’ve attended several artist residencies, what is it that stands out to you as most striking or special about your time with the SCAD Artist Atelier program? In other words, what about Savannah has affected your work the most during your stay?

JJ: One of the works is called "A lullaby for a Florida I lost," another is "You have my pink quartz heart” and oddly enough, the feeling that has come through the work is love and maybe a sense of loss. Savannah holds a special place in my heart, and I love the community here. Anytime I go out, I swear I run into someone I know, it’s a lovely feeling, something deeply comforting in it. And that has affected the painting, they have a nesting quality that I'm not sure I have associated with my work before. I keep having this feeling of the body as a vehicle. I was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 about 2 weeks before I started grad school. I got lucky, had an emergency surgery and there was no spread, but I am on an intensive surveillance program, so it never really leaves you. I had been wondering when it would come into the work. Maybe something in the escapism inherent in my work but also that I can’t escape my body and feel a certain poignancy in each moment, like every painting is a gift to make. I can feel its influence in this work, the mix of fantasy and the concrete.

LJY: Our bodies are so fragile, even more – maybe much more – fragile than the land, than nature. I’m relieved to hear that you are in a good place and this idea of vulnerability and ephemerality is enough to drive all of us to become artists; how to deal with life’s big uncertainties. Your experiences inform your work. I think of the series title, Fragile Horizon. I like the way that in your Fragile Horizon paintings you mention camping as “the peculiar act of recreation, performance, and ephemeral sheltering.” What are we seeking as we put our bodies into the land, we go “out there.” We create alternative shelters. To go camping is such a strange act if we really think about it. We go off into the woods and re-create our home-based and bodily needs. I like the way that your work defamiliarizes these actions, makes strange our bodies in nature. Can you say more about this “peculiar act of recreation, performance,” as you phrase it in your statement?

JJ: I didn’t grow up camping but found it in my 20's as a cheap way of traveling long distance and I always had a pretty basic setup, but sometimes I would see people who would bring their whole house with them, and I came upon the idea that camping reveals which things we value as most essential. In the paintings I will play with that concept at times. Bringing my cat, tarot cards, TVs, etc...

LJY: Also, the tent as a subject, of course, reminds me of Tracey Emin’s use of the tent as a performance site of intense intimacy. What is it about these views from the tent that suggest camping as an intimate experience within nature or a strange act of loneliness or escapism rather than intimacy? Can you say more about the horizon as fragile, as vulnerable?

JJ: I love Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With but I never really connected it to my work, but I enjoy the entanglement. I think the tent acts as a catch-all for the essential ephemeral shelter and depending on the context it can mean very different things. Emin's piece reminds me of kids building tents for sleepovers but of course a tent in a city setting quickly becomes a conversation about houselessness. I enjoy the view from the tent motif because of the way we have mediated our relationship with nature for good reason, it quickly goes from the awe-inspiring Arches, to lost in the high desert at 14 degrees and it all looks the same. The horizon as fragile was two ideas, one was inspired by Hito Steyerl's essay "In Free Fall” about how technology is quickly eroding the horizon line that she calls "a stable paradigm of orientation," and fragile is about how delicate the line between life and death is and I mean that in the wider context of our planet. It seems extinctions come and go, and we can’t really be attentive, or the spectacle won’t allow us.

LJY: ‘The spectacle won’t allow us,’ that’s a compelling way to phrase it. It places a kind of inhuman ideological control over us, over all of us, which feels so true most days when I wake up and read the newspaper. But then on the other hand, to remove human oversight or responsibility for the creation of spectacle and the swallowing of it is to remove our own culpability as well.

Thinking of framing nature in your work, many artists like Robert Irwin, Andy Warhol, Faith Ringgold, Bill Viola, and Marina Abramović all come to my mind. Later in their lives, each noted a childhood or early experience that sparked a lifelong thematic engagement with a subject; a kind of raison d’etre for their practice. Your artist statement mentions the importance of memory in relation to the land. Is there a moment in your own experience early on that stands out for you, a connection between your childhood and your studio practice?

JJ: My first memory is of the peach tree in our backyard freezing, it was covered with icicles, and I remember the morning light shining through them beautifully but also that same freeze killing the tree. I think most of my early memories deal with that sort of ephemerality. I had a special childhood in that my parents just let me be a kid. Art didn’t really exist as a thing one could do in our house but something about the freedom my brother and I had, I can see how it would engender a creative capacity.

LJY: Interesting. I like the frozen peach tree image; the beauty and the death in one object. Kids seem to have some kind of a special tunnel to abstraction. Maybe it’s a matter of re-feeling that, re-membering it. Becoming a member of that capacity once more. The objects in your series, Portents Along the Watershed, are cartoon-like solids, yet also abstract suggestions of tragic engineering “solutions.” With Portents, I think of two totally different points of reference: First, Alex Katz in relation to nature and the simultaneity of abstraction and the solidity of natural forms. How would you describe your work’s in-between space, between object depiction and abstraction?

JJ: The way that Katz paints trees has always gotten to me. His economy of paint is sort of unmatched, maybe Margaret Kilgallen would give him a run for his money. That in between space has taken a lot of effort, trying to figure out what level of realism works with the abstraction and vice versa. I've settled on what I call an “illustrative realism” as the best match-up of the more abstract backgrounds.

LJY: Coining a term?! Nice. The second point of reference that comes to mind (for me), and to be sure, any references I bring to the work are also based on my own experiences… others would certainly raise connections. The second artist I thought of with these “illustrative realism” works of yours, is actually Charles Sheeler and his Machine Age paintings, his tenacity of (or brutality of?) the man-made, the engineered “solutions” of manufacturing. In your work, I think of the culverts that redirect our natural environments, directly and indirectly harming waterways, species, and humans. How does your work contend with engineering the land?

JJ: Sheeler is a great reference, a master of simplifying the form, although I would find making a lifetime of that type of painting tedious. But the similarities with the infrastructure I paint in Portents is uncanny. With Portents, I wanted the human-built environment and the non-human space to be separate languages. Not usually a fan of symmetry but I found it compelling in emphasizing the Western desire for order. With that body of work I wanted to start a conversation looking at how even the smallest built elements in the environment that we take for granted, that aren’t oil refineries or plastic factories still do real harm in the chain of ecological connections.

LJY: Such a great point, this idea of the chain of harm. Hmm. I’ve been thinking that The Center for Land Use Interpretation might be interesting for you. I noticed your phrase in the Portents statement about humans and nature: “there is no real coexistence.” This feels truthful. Maybe it’s the bottom line of your work so far? The CLUI also explores projects that recognize that landscape is the wrong word now; that there is no romanticizing the destruction wrought by an out-of-control history of mining, greed, tourism, byproducts of manufacturing, and dumping, and landfills, and parking lots, and construction, and on and on. Can you say more about this phrase “there is no real coexistence”?

JJ: I just think of it as a fact of the western imperialist tradition, and I use that statement to also apply to the white settlers that colonized this country. There is no tradition of coexistence with the non-human spaces of the world, it is pervaded with a deep moral superiority, every resource is up for grabs and will be bent to their will without seeing the ecological tail that snaps back if you break the cycle that ultimately feeds you. Really, it’s amazing the world is still functioning at all with what has been done to it.

LJY: In fact, is romanticization of the land and of “the great American road trip” even possible in our time? Can we have romanticization or optimism at all in relation to the land? Perhaps it became impossible, or at least its viability challenged, after the widespread expansion of polymers, of plastics in the post-WWII era?

JJ: I read William Least Heat-Moon and he’s great at just telling the trip as it is, dinner here, slept in his van there, talked to an old man in Virginia; and it’s still a form of Magic Realism. But a moment exists and … Can you have a moment anymore without being weighed down by everything we know? Every time we “view” a “landscape” now all the footnotes are there. They are haunting us. They are present. But they are also very useful. In fact, you never really see the landscapes in my work without a reference to the weight of the past, a relay to the footnotes. It is not isolated. I like to paint en plein air, for instance, but I’d never show it.

LJY: I totally get that. It feels like a very different act. But to lean toward it, why not? How do you envision this difference? Do you feel like painting en plein air is irrelevant or could it be revived as a way to pay new attention to the “real world” beyond the screen? Or is it off limits because of its art history and its Romantic heritage?

JJ: Rackstraw Downes, an English painter, comes to mind since he breaks the traditional nature of it and takes the genre to a new space. Actually, he kind of breaks the horizon or more likely bends it. I just think as a white man there’s been enough plein air done by my lot. Maybe also the genre carries all the weight of the mythical landscape construct we've been speaking of.

LJY: About Rackstraw Downes, a few artists come to my mind while getting to know your work and maybe you could respond to, reject, or add to these? I think of Henri Rousseau’s patterning and flatness, his paintings of nature and of utopian visionary scenes in the wild. I keep coming back to Alex Katz’s nature paintings or maybe they are just on my mind lately; with their surface-distance tension and repetition, his blades of grass, his trees. Or do other moments in art history stand out to you?

JJ: Katz worked hard to get to that minimal response to form, with Rousseau it’s his ability to harmonize a picture that always fascinated me. Margaret Kilgallen, I love her work and the way she saw the world. But the first artist who really changed the way I thought of art was Richard Long. My friend Cory gave me his book as a gift and Long's work broke my brain. I just never thought walking could also be seen as art. The Mission School in the late 90's will always be my favorite movement in art: McGee, Kilgallen and ESPO. Their lives and art had no separation.

LJY: Interesting. I want to return to this Mission School era of your past. I was also thinking of your Portals series – views of the flat and the distant – which reminds me of Nancy Holt’s lesser-known portals since one of my students is currently working on these for a thesis project. Your Portals and Holt’s frame the land through the viewing aperture of the camera. The portal is like a secondary eye, or a mediated vision. Also, I notice stock photographs that you post up near your current series in your studio. They are grand, distant mountain views, and desert highways. I know you studied photography for your BFA at SCAD. What role does the camera play in your background and in your process?

JJ: I wonder if we can even imagine the image without the camera. It must have existed before it but the camera sort of shifted the world forever. The portals are a weird series for me – I have never made them continuously for a body of work. They just pop up once or twice a year in my practice. They exist as an in-between painting. They represent the notion of the lens, of a way of using a tool to see, kind of voyeurism but also dream-like. For me, the camera is everywhere in my work. I see my BFA in Photo as a 4-year expression in how to see space. But I could tell by year four I was beginning to get bored with just straightforward photos. I explored alternative process and shot 8x10 for a whole year. Drawing and sculptural elements started to creep into my work.

And then I made my first body of paintings once I moved to San Francisco. I lived in an artist-collective a few of my friends had started in a kind of illegal space in an auto garage, a big warehouse split in two – 14 of us in a 6,000 square foot building – each of us paying $550/month – only one bathroom. For 2 years! We were trying to recreate a Canal Street dream when rent was cheap, and art was weird and sort of life-giving. That’s when I started painting for the first time. It was during Fleet Week and a bunch of anti-military activists used our space to make banners protesting the Naval presence in the Bay. They were making these massive banners out of old sailboat sails and had one left over, so I cut them up into canvases and stretched them on these terrible 2x4 stretcher bars, I had no idea what I was doing. At that point I was into Diebenkorn and Basquiat. They both were great gesturalists, and I loved that Basquiat would have like 5 TVs on and be reading books while painting in his Armani suit.

LJY: Your San Francisco years sound especially formative, are there other travel or life experiences that stand out to you most (so far) in terms of how they have shaped your sense of being as an artist?

JJ: After SF, I lived in Vermont then Savannah and Nola. Now I am living in Gainesville, FL but not forever. My first drive across the country was leaving SF to go to Vermont. I remember listening to this Peter Gabriel cassette tape with “Red Rain” on it repeatedly while driving through the desert. It was the first time I had been in the southwest and now that album always takes me back to that space. Something about the blue of the sky and the red earth, never seen anything so... there’s not even words for it.

And looking back, I participated in a semester-at-sea program, where we circumnavigated the earth – I did this during my sophomore year at SCAD. It was hosted through UVA. My step-mom told me to apply but that I most likely wouldn’t get in, next thing I know I'm taking classes on a ship with 300 other students while we traveled the world. It opened my eyes to the complicated nature of the world but also the massive footprint the US has around the planet. We camped for one night in a rainforest in Malaysia, it was a complete disaster – we had to sleep on a big rock in the river to avoid the leeches and giant ants. Mostly I just learned that other cultures exist and that diversity in how we live our lives is essential to a larger human identity.

LJY: What a dream/nightmare, maybe both at once. I mean the leeches part mostly. A seriously once-in-a-lifetime experience. Did you learn to sail and go camping a lot as a kid?

JJ: No, but my dad was a fishing boat captain, a sports fishing boat – of course they weren’t his boats, he just worked on them. And I didn’t grow up camping. I grew up hunting, so my family thought camping was for bozos. [laughter] I like it now, to stay outside and to travel economically. Something about waking up with the dawn and hearing the world come alive.

LJY: The hunting experience seems essential for your work, maybe even at the heart of it?

JJ: When we were hunting, I used to sit in the tree-stand, just sit quietly and connect with the land. I’m interested in our relationship to the land, more than the hunting part. The land should be protected. We should protect the land, and even that language is complicated. It’s tough to say “we.” It makes so many assumptions: who do I mean by “us”? So, I’ll just say “I.” I am interested in what the role of landscape is in my life. Tyler Green wrote a beautiful book, Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea (2021). He deals with how the word “landscape” didn’t exist in the American parlance till Emerson's essay, Nature, became popular. But he puts forth a great argument about how the word “landscape” came to mean pictures of places that were being developed by white settlers. Thomas Cole’s painting The Oxbow is the prime example of this idea. The right-hand side shows land being put to its proper use, from the colonists’ perspective, and on the left you have wilderness which was a representation of the Indigenous territory. You notice how the clou clouds are dark on the left-hand side and the skies are clear on the right, it's clear propaganda for white settlers’ right to steal the land.

LJY: Your work alludes to adventuring into the “great outdoors”, and yet it also speaks to the absurdity of this gesture and your question of “who has the right to explore,” specifically in The United States. Can you say more about the idea of the adventure and what constructs you’ve encountered to make you question the idea of land rights?

And perhaps related to this issue, in the Fragile Horizon series and in some individual paintings we find machete knives, a wallet with the American flag, pocket knives, an ATV, an axe, and a variety of rifles, markers of a certain masculinity. The clashing, and at times coordinated, patterned colors are Pop, playful, and somehow menacing, like a disturbance or a migraine. There is some anguish in these scenes, it seems. Can you say a little more about the issue of aggression within the American landscape experience?

JJ: I think it comes back to that idea of performance. I am wary of the word “adventure” because in the American context it can become nostalgia for a past, much of which was of colonization and genocide. We should avoid a sort of 'Westworld' syndrome in how we look to the west. It is a place, not a playground for our adventures. It deserves a collective engagement in its histories and respecting the trauma it holds. With the Fragile Horizon series, I was dealing with my own upbringing as a kind of survivalist. Like, what do I do with this knowledge and why do I need to bring the essentials to 'survive' when I venture out into the world. But then all the patterning is like an acid trip, representing a fragmentation of place but maybe also of the idea that what we remember is always slipping. On the aggression side, it exists, and traveling can be super dangerous in the USA and I'm saying that with all the privileges of a white man. Last winter Allison and I went to Zion National Park, Denver, and New Mexico, but around Gila National Forest. We had a scary encounter where we were all alone with no cell service and got blocked in by this massive truck that pulled in just as we were going to bed. This dude was super drunk and had rifles and was trying to get us back to his house, fucking terrifying. It was a good reminder of the whiteness and the aggression that belies the scenery. I have traveled throughout the West quite a bit, but it's a complicated space. You have the Don’t Tread on Me militia groups right next to The Sierra Club liberalism right next to the Navajo reservation and all of this reveals the heritage of the American West. A bad habit that the American government literally tried to eradicate every indigenous person on this continent and still it has yet to atone for this on a meaningful scale. When I talk about having a relationship with the land and with conservation of those spaces, I can’t help but ask who I mean by “we” or “us.”

LJY: That story is terrifying. My heart is literally racing as you describe it. Worst nightmare. And then this issue again of the pronouns: ours, yours, we, us. I’ve always been a huge Barbara Kruger groupie. Her work has always questioned the assumptive pronouns and asked us to critically think about what we mean when we read (or think) words like “we” or “us,” “them” or “you.”

JJ: Right. So, when I say “us” – who do I mean? And yet this sense of the collective will is still important. It sort of makes representative democracy impossible without it. And the ideas about land are important to me – having spent so much time in a natural environment. So, I need to just say “I” and then work from that first person sense of any statement about land.

LJY: I think of the Woody Guthrie tune “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” and how I feel like crying every time I hear that song. I always have. It’s something about the use of the collective terms that the land is both mine and yours. It has to be shared. The pronouns and the way that land is understood, or could be, and perhaps isn’t, that feels sad and yet the song also feels somehow always optimistic to me.

JJ: Yea, I think it’s driving toward the right message, inclusivity, and a strong sense of place.

LJY: So true. Ultimately, would you even call your work “landscapes”?

JJ: I would say they are a response to the tradition of making landscapes.

LJY: How do titles emerge for you?

JJ: It’s hard for me to say, but if ideas come into my head while I’m working, they are usually the best ones. It’s hard to have a critical dialog while making them. The new work has a certain asymmetry. I use the asymmetrical windowsill to tackle the compositional balance of space.

The window is like an escape and the interior becomes the anchor. But there is no escape. Forever we have used the American West as a place to escape. How can you not be aware of your absence in society? It is always adjacent or in proximity, nearby. I think we live in a very different moment now. What if we really need that? We need that freedom or “freeness” versus the idea of holding all of history at once. I hope my work touches on all of those things, that it contains all of the contradictions. In terms of space and land and nature, you have to let go at some point. The world gets so heavy otherwise. There is something beautiful and people need these inclusive spaces to define and redefine themselves.

LJY: When I was leaving your studio, I was drawn to a Mary Oliver poem on your studio wall. I had just this week bought a Mary Oliver book and sent two more of her books to my sister-in-law. Coincidence? The wiser I get, I am starting to think that there are no coincidences, only signs… Her sense of how the lands bind us, is bound with memory and reclamation… ‘meanwhile the world goes on… meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air, are heading home again…’ In the long run, do you think your work is bound to a kind of heart of darkness and the sense that we can’t engineer our way out of our man-made destruction, or does it tip toward the optimistic and a sense of nature as reclamation?

JJ: Yea, Jane Kenyon and Oliver both have a gift for describing their connection to a place. There’s a painter, Tom Uttech, who also reminds me of their writing. The natural world will go on with or without us. But I hope we find a collective empathy toward a life that is a balance between touching the soil and a greater focus on the present moment. I always think Oliver is whispering, “be here now.”

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