Holiday 2025

Jordan Rountree deepens his exploration of Surrealist literary techniques, applying them to the ancient art of woodcut printing. This series of ink-on-paper prints follows the journey of an unnamed figure who ventures ever deeper into a mythological wilderness. Guided by spontaneity and chance, Rountree begins each work by interpreting the natural patterns in the tree rings of the woodblock, searching for latent images. Once found, he carves these images into the wood, elaborating on them while preserving the minimalist style and use of negative space that characterize his earlier work.

Each print walks the line between abstraction and representation, accompanied by a descriptive text that also serves as the piece’s title. Though Rountree employs traditional woodcut techniques, his visual language draws from the interplay between figures and nature found in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, as well as the emotionally charged depictions of relationships and isolation in Edvard Munch's The Frieze of Life.

The eponymous landscape, the setting of the series, reflects both an external environment and an inner terrain; nocturnal scenes and quietly tense encounters coexist with depictions of dissociative episodes, sudden insights, and epiphanic dreams. As with each medium in his multidisciplinary practice, Rountree continues to consider the metaphysics of form, investigating the poetic resonances of working with wood itself—its presence and "aliveness," and the layers of history inscribed in its tree rings that offer glimpses of the organism’s life and growth.