Flint Jamison

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Flint Jamison’s third and fourth exhibitions at the gallery, Class: Weight at 88 Eldridge Street and Installation View at 36 Orchard Street.

As the artist writes: My presentation of new work is comprised of three aspects over two exhibitions.

2. For Installation View, presented at 36 Orchard Street, I have asked poet, artist and organizer Tim Johnson to respond to these works and their site.

Notes on Installation View for Flint Jamison

"'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained, To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed, To turn, turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come 'round right."

—Elder Joseph Brackett, “Simple Gifts” (1848)

In times of national strife, America turns to the Shakers. Or so a friend told me last year, in the lead up to the US national elections. It resonated, but uncomfortably. On further conversation, the same friend directed me to William D. Moore’s Shaker Fever: America’s Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect, a very informative book that outlines the period, 1925–1965, during which the Shakers came to ‘personify’ the “nation’s finest qualities of piety, ingenuity, simplicity, sobriety and self-denial.” By existing outside the mainstream, Moore argues, and yet within the trajectory of American colonial history, the Shakers “paradoxically…serve as both icons of Americanism and as critiques of national shortcomings.” The paradox helped to reaffirm the persistence of America’s finest qualities, in the new light of industrial modernism. The paradox breaks down, or possibly multiplies, when one sees how the Shaker example was concurrently used to support causes as diverse and contradictory as American exceptionalism, entrepreneurialism, feminism, craft-communalism and the abolition of private property.

What bothered me about the turn that Moore and my friend address is not the articulation of the nation’s finest qualities, or even the arguments on behalf of American exceptionalism, but rather the argument to make the Shakers nationally constitutive, and the resemblance of those arguments to the familiar rhetoric of “a few bad apples,” which spoil the police force. In the case of the Shakers, of course, we’re not talking about the bad, but rather the good, or even very good apples, which show just how pious and hard-working the nation is, at its core, and how, despite the bad apples, the core is still worth defending, regardless of what it does or has done. It’s as if Tom Joad might negate political reality by saying, “Think of a chair, whenever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, and it’ll be there.”

I thought of this adage about the Shakers and national strife when Flint asked me to write something for his upcoming exhibition, where he will present a garage door, an entertainment center and speaker housings, all made from carefully cut, sanded and assembled pieces of beetle-bored lumber. He sent me photos of the work in progress and again, it resonated, but uncomfortably. What are those bore-holes doing there? Oh, they're the result of an invasive species. Flint later told me an art shipper initially declined to transport the work for fear of what the bore-holes might indicate. As to whether the perceived liability which prevented them from accepting the shipment was related to concerns over structural integrity, an unacceptable increase in precarious value, archival uncertainty, or the danger of infection to the shipper’s other goods of transport, the shipper was vague. In the nation of finest qualities, it’s hard to say. What’s clear is that Flint’s work speaks to domestic and boundary conditions long permeated by fears of foreign agents, themselves potentially masking deeper fears that what’s foreign in the wood might not be so stable or foreign.

Acquiring Shaker goods, the story goes, you furnish your house with the nation’s finest qualities. If you can’t pay for piety or ingenuity, whole industries have developed to distribute them more affordably in products as diverse as soap and salsa. Since 1965, the fever you catch is usually secular Shakerism. Despite the update, or rebranding, there remains something in the colonial etiology that a new name cannot make right, but which an attempt to produce a more accurate historical context might help to clarify. I’ll admit, there’s still so much work to do, only it might not be the work we have in mind.

3. Finally, I have produced issue 13/18 of Veneer Magazine. A dozen material stocks are used and five different printing methods have been deployed in its production. Katherine Pickard, publisher at Sequence Press and Managing Editor of Veneer, introduces this issue of the serial publication:

"From handmade to mechanized, from the body to the shop, the code makers are the code breakers—this circuit is closed. Handpicked, letterpressed, offset, inkjet, silkscreened, foil stamped, spiral bound, soup to nuts. Artist as editor, publisher, materials hoarder and printer. Beatrix Potter’s Victorian journal beckons a dedicated decipherer; a neurosurgeon’s manual cautions technicians before imaging; a sheet of music by Juan Gabriel sets the tune for a bittersweet plea; and a North American gas producer leaves holiday gluttons and the nitrous galaxy clamoring. Primary sources are placed before us as documentary guidance. Warnings—from our elders and our experts—are directions for the preservation of our bodies and the earth. Veneer 13 sticks to the science for us to ponder: What Next?"

Consistent with my old interest in the means of production underlying the creation of artworks, I have attended to as much myself as possible to bring this exhibition to life. As is evident here, I have also tended to the modes of communication, editions, and ephemera associated with the show and publication. The works incorporate materials such as a fir repurposed from the Puget Sound with the residue of invasive worms, full range drivers, organza, photographs, linear actuators, garage door hardware, vibrators, power stations, steel, aluminum, foil, rubber, replica titanium hardware, various controllers, and paper. Again, each work requires regular maintenance.

Flint Jamison (b. 1979, Billings, MT) had his last presentation at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2017. Since, he has had solo exhibitions at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, Air de Paris, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, as well as small-scale shows at Paid, Seattle and Marfa Book Co. in Marfa, TX. He has also produced numerous artist books; and as a co-founder of Yale Union in Portland, OR, lead the effort of the building’s rematriation to the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in 2021.

Jamison’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; and the Princeton University Library, among others.