THE OVERTURES

Jamison Mead is Pushing his Perimeter

Our 2025 February Resident

by Miden Wood

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Jamison Mead is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of February. 

“It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be what it is.”

It’s a new year of the DVAA residency, and our first resident artist of 2025 is making the most of the studio’s most essential resource: space.

Steven’s experience expressing these feelings through the lens of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) is part of the reason this upcoming workshop is so important to him. When he got angry as a kid, Steven tells us, he would “just freeze. It's like there's something right here,” he points to his chest, “and I can't come up with the right words, and I can't get it out, and I get so angry.” With another career as an instructional designer, it makes sense that he would be so invested in sharing frameworks that have worked for him in a world that he has often had to navigate without one.

The pandemic lockdown of 2020 changed the ways that Jamison Mead (and much of global society) occupied space. His work from those years shows the intimate details of day-to-day life as it occurred within these new day-to-day boundaries: a face reflected back to you from the rectangle of a screen; knick knacks and clutter hemmed by the edges of a desk. Every piece features some kind of perimeter. As this novelty Garfield is hemmed in by the glass on which he’s printed, the work asks, how are we, too, enclosed inside these four walls? The subject matter is wry, and often renders the cartoonish by way of realism. Jamison’s painting, “Broken Glass (The Struggle for Security),” fittingly features Linus, the Peanuts character most notorious for his attachment to an ever-present security blanket. Viewing this character from the inside of the glass prompts us to think about Linus’s inner workings, and our own. What’s at the heart of our relationships with objects? Where does security end and unhealthy attachment begin? Furthermore, how does media (popular and physical) become a companion when community is scarce?

“In 2020, when everything moved into the apartment and I was laid off of work and just drawing all the time… that was like a really big moment artistically for me.” Jamison’s work at the time stayed relatively small—both in the hyper-local subject matter and the scale of the canvas. This is in part due to a need for manageable sizes in limited working space, and in part because, as Jamison says in our interview in the residency studio, the small proportions just felt right for the subject matter—made the art feel more like an homage to the object it depicted by being an object itself. “I love art as objects,” Jamison says. “I also love the way you approach a utilitarian object, and how it tells you how it wants to be used, and how it wants to be in the world. And I feel like art has that same quality, where there is maybe not a utilitarian purpose to it, but there's something else about it that tells you what it wants to do, and what it wants to be, and where it wants to go; what it wants to be around.”

“Art has that same quality, where there is maybe not a utilitarian purpose to it, but… it tells you what it wants to do, and what it wants to be, and where it wants to go; what it wants to be around.”

“Some things are supposed to be a certain size and they kind of tell you the size that they want to be. I think some part of that has influenced the size of the work that I've made, that has been pretty small and pretty intimate… It makes it more like a fetishistic object.”

Now, the art is telling Jamison it wants to be something new: it wants to be large. Honoring that urge is Jamison’s main intention for the residency here at DVAA. “I'm so used to drawing and like having the space of like a motion be like that,” Jamison says, demonstrating his usual, closed posture with a small piece. “Being able to use more of my body,” he makes a wide gesture, “like my arm and shoulder and everything… that was a big draw to wanting to have a space like this.”

The stretch is a somatic and an artistic one, accompanied by all the challenges of expanding one’s skill set—of venturing into something new. “I feel extremely like I'm at the very beginning of what I'm doing, and I just don't have the skill yet to be able to make what I want to make.” I paraphrase an Ira Glass quote, about how the hardest period of practicing a new craft is when your skill is still catching up with your taste, and he agrees: “I'm really down on myself right now because I'm not making anything I'm really proud of, or whatever—but I'm still making stuff, which I'm proud about doing… It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be what it is.”

This, in my mind, is the courage that so often accompanies a residency: that being in a new space presents the opportunity to try something new—and yet those nascent efforts will be more visible than they would be practicing in private. The work behind the work is likewise on display. So, too, was it intimidating to re-enter a post-lock-down world. I remember the fumbled conversations and wary group gatherings characteristic of my first months outside the house. Looking at Jamison’s new work, I see in it a new kind of security, like we’re building new containers to carry out into the world; frames that have room for us to grow.

“I don't know, they're still really, like, contained,” Jamison says, pointing out trees that frame the central expanse of a new landscape, “but it is definitely looking outwards a lot more instead of like this navel gazing that I feel like I am really drawn to in still life.” Fields, parks and skyscapes, rendered in ink and paint, stretch across the residency studio. “I was struggling trying to make still lives at this scale, and so far it just hasn't worked out and that's fine. So I've just been looking more at landscapes and trying to think of the space around me.” In another painting, a picnic blanket provides the familiar frame-within-a-frame.

“Some things are supposed to be a certain size and they kind of tell you the size that they want to be.”

If his work isn’t quite where he would like it to be yet, Jamison points to Wolf Khan and Lois Dodd as inspiration for where he wants this new scope of work to go. In Khan’s work, he’s drawn to “these semi -abstract, like, very color… color forward paintings, huge landscape paintings.” 

As for Lois Dodd, “I love how she, like, observes the landscape as an object… The window motif is huge in her work, and I love that.” The motif of frames and containers draws him in: “There's like a containment to them. There's a safety in that.” I wonder if, in this new phase of his work, Jamison is engaging with an era of new objects. Maybe we are finally emerging from a tangible life rendered so local—the books at our fingertips; the faces enclosed in Zoom screen perimeters—to one where security can be found in the expanse; in a copse of trees; in a snake peeking out from under a rock.

The rock and its accompanying snake are inspired by an instance in which Jamison happened upon a snake during his hobby of rock-lifting. Rock-lifting is exactly what it sounds like. “It's this strong-man sport slash ancient tradition, So it's like, It's funny. It's goofy,” Jamison explains. “You start to think, like, ‘Oh man, can I lift that rock up?’”

“Do you feel like you like to challenge yourself?” I ask him. Whether it’s his art practice or big honking rocks, this seems to be a connective thread. “I try,” Jamison says, “I try. Some days it's better to challenge myself than others.” But on the good days, Jamison is pushing his own limits. “If I can lift that huge rock, what can't I do?”