Journie Cirdain renders objects observed in the everyday fabric of New York life — chandeliers at the Met, cut flowers at Trader Joe’s, a tree pushing through a sidewalk crack, lace glimpsed on a bridal photoshoot in Central Park — and reframes them through a doubled point of view, her own and that of the spiders who inhabit them. The doubling is structural rather than illustrative: drawing on the conventions of the still life and the depiction of luxury, Cirdain reimagines these art-historical subjects as living participants in an enmeshed environment, each at once a human luxury and an ecological niche, a site of aesthetic projection and a site of survival.
Working without a grid, she builds each composition through graphite accretion rather than transcription, letting the drawings grow organically from memory, observation, and photographic reference. Graphite, in her hands, is neither efficient nor resolved; it is a slow scratching that mirrors the patient labor of the web and the lace alike. With a film director’s focus on drama and a romantic flirtation with the macabre, Cirdain’s drawings betray an exquisite attention to light surface as a chandelier becomes an environment for cobwebs; a spiderweb glistens like crystal; a bouquet hangs next to the site of its extraction; an environment shows beheaded tulips. Within an eco-feminist frame indebted to writers and artists alike — Emily Dickinson, Vija Celmins, Carolee Schneemann, and Aldo Leopold, among others — the work proposes that decentering the human gaze need not abandon beauty, only relocate it.
Journie Nikala Cirdain (born 1993, Santa Rosa, CA) has shown work at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois, A Gallery in Seattle, and in Chicago at Goldfinch and Patient Info. Her work has written about in Hyperallergic, New City and Chicago Reader and her writing has appeared in Chicago Artist Writers and F newsmagazine. Cirdain received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She lives and works in Queens, New York.