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“We are all migrants through time.”

from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Landscape had been a consistent touchstone in my work--sometimes overtly, sometimes not--perhaps related to having almost literally grown up in a National Park. Living in cities for my adult life, I collect images of our built environment in various stages of ruin and completion then prompts paintings addressing disparate issues of time, connection, restraint and abandon. The grid can contain most of these references, and the flatness of a painting at once.

Having spent my studio work referencing the land and pulling images and titles from photos taken from walk, my life and studio have coalesced into this body of work. Race and class, neighborhood, politics, truth and surveillance - current issues have prompted a palette shift for this new work. Though I have never considered myself a “genre” painter, I found myself huddled around the warm campfire of abstraction for several years. Much of the content of the work is unchanged, but there has been a slippage into figuration/representation. Adding more “context” to a landscape seemed important given our current political climate related to very personal and “street-level” concerns (education, guns, equality).

- Jodi Hays, 2017

Jodi Hays is the recipient of grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Her works are included in collections of the J. Crew Company (NY), Nashville International Airport, National Parks of America, Gordon College (MA), and the Tennessee State Museum. Residencies include The Cooper Union School of Art and Vermont Studio Center.

She received her M.F.A from Vermont College, her B.F.A. from The University of Tennessee, and studied Foundations at School of Visual Arts (SVA). She lived and worked in Boston for a number of years where she was Assistant Director at the Cambridge Art Association. She moved to East Nashville in late 2005, teaching and curating, working with artists like William Pope.L and Shaun Leonardo. She maintains a studio and pop-up gallery (Dadu). She was a founding member of Coop Gallery and continues to teach, from 8 years olds in her neighborhood to graduate students. She shows her work with The Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville) and Show and Tell Art and Design (Charleston, SC).

Hays was interviewed by writer Erica Ciccarone last year for Burnaway. You can read more here.