Jockum Nordström constructed his latest body of work in a remote farmhouse studio on Gotland, an island off the coast of Sweden. The resulting hand-drawn, hand-cut collages have the air of objects made in isolation, somewhere between a child’s attic-playroom and the basement lair of a sexual deviant. Paper figures are lovingly arranged against backdrops divided like comic strips, engaging in social pleasantries or in various stages of erotic undress, as in I Was Laying Down and I Was Sitting up / I Dreamed That Night / I Dreamed That the Song Was Backwards, 2014.
Sitting quietly on shelves are also five small abstract sculptures, deftly fashioned from crayon, cardboard, and matchboxes. The tactility and building block format of these works, such as Lesson, 2014, share the collages’ allusion to imaginative child’s play, but their understated geometrical compositions strike a more subtle balance between naive idioms and sophisticated concepts.
The exhibition centers, however, around three large watercolor collages inspired by the frescoes of Gotland’s medieval churches. The collages’ deeply saturated, earthen-tone backgrounds are brought to life by cutouts interacting within strangely juxtaposed realms. Childhood lore and adult fantasy intermingle, as chance encounters between pinup girls, antiquated horsemen, roving dogs, and Gothic Madonnas play out. Nordström’s use of nursery themes to convey adult content is often disturbing, inducing conflicting emotional responses similar to those caused by Henry Darger’s The Story of the Vivian Girls or Kara Walker’s silhouettes. His images’ intimate, delicately rendered appearance and almost obsessive attention to detail heighten the sense that they occupy some deep and unpredictable psychological space, at turns whimsical, sordid, and sinister.