Jonah Criswell’s Reside makes you his tenant
In a 2009 interview with The Pitch, author and Daily Show resident expert John Hodgman told a story about an interview he’d once conducted with sculptor Robert Berks, whose JFK bust sits in the grand foyer of the Kennedy Center Opera House.
“I was in his studio, and he had a sculpture of, I think, Robert Kennedy,” Hodgman said. “It was a full-body sculpture. And we were across the studio, and he said, ‘How does that look? Life-size?’ And I said yes, it seemed life-size. And he brought me closer, and I saw that it was actually one-and-a-half-times life-size. And he said, ‘If you make it life-size, it looks too small. You have to make it one-and-a-half times life-size.’ ” What Hodgman took away from that meeting, he said, was a simple truth about art: “You need to exaggerate life’s strangeness only a small amount to remember how strange it actually is.”
Artist Jonah Criswell’s paintings of apartments distort perspective in a way that Berks would recognize. The lines of floorboards, the edges of walls and ceilings, the trajectories of the hanging drapes — all go vectoring off toward impossible and separate horizons. But Criswell endows the spaces with tactile and recognizable details that convey unmistakable senses of place that would be impossible to achieve with straightforward architectural drawing. These apartments, like Berks’ full-body sculptures, are in fact exaggerated only a small amount.
The focal point of “We Are Home I” is not the television but rather the nighttime cityscape outside the window of the spartan apartment. But, as in real life, a lit television screen demands eyeballs. The one here is playing Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris, the blue tube light falling across floor and furniture. It’s a particular gift of Criswell’s to capture artificial light convincingly, lending his chromatic works a palpable texture under the illumination of reality.
The composition is anchored by a plastic trash can in the lower-right corner. It’s stuffed with exactly the kind of packaging-intensive post-consumer waste that you’d expect to see in the underfurnished apartment of a job-market newbie. Criswell is interested in apartments not as homes but as transitional spaces: entry-level residences of the newly graduated or uncomplicated, temporary shelters for the upwardly mobile. They are places to which nobody becomes attached, indifferent enclosures for successive occupants. He has, after all, called this exhibit of paintings and large-scale graphite drawings Reside, as opposed to, say, Dwell or Nest or anything else indicating domestic permanence.
The paintings feature no human figures and minimal evident furniture, yet somehow they don’t feel completely vacant. “We Are Home II” again glows with overhead lighting that casts hard shadows under furniture and around corners. The artist’s preoccupation with skewed perspective shows here with the impossible foreground placement of another Rubbermaid kitchen trash can. Blue LEDs backlight the keys of an Apple MacBook, its screen displaying a first-person shooter any reasonably experienced gamer will recognize as Call of Duty. The game provides a key to understanding Criswell’s apartment paintings. The viewpoint is first-person, as in the game. Criswell includes no human occupants in order to make the observer the tenant.
In the series of large graphite drawings, the artist pursues the same goals with a different, more labor-intensive strategy. Criswell has reproduced images taken from low-res digital photos used in apartment advertisements, blowing them beyond scale to the level of individual pixels. “Great 2 Bdrm Perfect for College Students” starts as a plain-Jane image of an apartment’s entryway, a countertop surface in the foreground, a mass-produced half-globe light fixture hanging from the ceiling. Criswell, though, has broken the image into a grid in which tiny individual squares define both the tonal gradations and the scan lines introduced by low-grade digital photography. In this way, he honors the original images while still capturing — and intensifying — the vacant feel of an unoccupied flat. It’s almost possible to smell paint and cleansers, the odors from empty cabinets.
The vertical scan lines of some cheap digital camera also center “2 Bdrm Aprtmnt Great View No Utilities,” a view of a living room with French doors and what appears to be a ceiling fan. Criswell doesn’t skew the perspective in these drawings, but that’s not the only way he knows to exaggerate the elements which most convey the spirit of a particular place. Here, by adhering to the low-res information imparted by digital reproduction, he captures the strange twining of isolation and possibility imbued in an empty living space. As in the paintings, no human is visible here. But the camera’s flash, rendered by hand, reflects in the door’s glass panes.
