Jason HoylmanPainter / Sculptor
Baltimore, MD |
Biography
Jason Hoylman was born in Oklahoma. After traveling throughout
the United States he settled in Baltimore where he met his wife and has lived
for the past 15 years. In 2007, Hoylman received his BFA from MICA. Hoylman has lived and worked in
Station North for several years, watching artists take an active
initiative in creating a stronger neighborhood network through investment in
property and developing collective spaces for artists to work and live.
Hoylman is fascinated by math theory and visual aesthetics of numbers and geometrical figures, which inspire his paintings and sculptures. Taking conceptual cues from theory found in mathematics, he studies both tactile and visual phenomena pulled from the combined numbers and data he is currently analyzing to present abstract ideas through a lens that is uniquely his own. Hand-scribbled notes, computer derived maps, and personal experience become compositional elements that serve the messages found in this body of work. |
In his
new commission for the exhibition, 27
Portraits of Passing that form a Magic Cube, Hoylman explores the
day-to-day movements by individuals of a geographic community. The cubes serve
as individual portraits that trace the walking/driving/busing/biking habits of 27 different people from
Station North over the course of several months. Among the 27 individuals, nine
are close friends of Hoylman’s, nine are members of the Curatorial Practice
class of 2015, and nine are individuals Hoylman met while participating in the
exhibition, including other LOCALLY
SOURCED artists. Hoylman presents these records by each participant in a
form that references building blocks scattered through the gallery. When placed
in order, stacked in sequence of an algorithmically-created cube, he presents a
newly created community defined by space.
This is the first time the artist has attempted a community project of this nature. The work relies on the dedication of its participants through the exercise of walking with purpose and recording the results. Each block represents personal journeys of the participants in Station North and beyond over the period of a month. With this work, Hoylman suggests that all of our paths can intersect and intertwine, and indeed they do most often in Station North, the geographical center of Baltimore. Inviting community members to collaborate as content makers for his work, each of the traced paths of the 27 individuals, along with the artist’s own (Change in Place), offers a minimal and abstracted approach to considering an artistically driven, collective use of space, thereby expanding aesthetic notions of community-engaged practices. The work allows us to draw our own connections about what shared space is, how it manifests itself on a daily basis and how our own personal journey’s monotony can be a way to relate mutual experience. |
All Original Content © 2014 Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), MICA Curatorial Practice MFA Program Class of 2015, and the artists