The first adjective used to describe Jason Stout’s gallery exhibit, “In My Room, Alone with Everyone,” was “uncomfy.” My friend used that word to describe his paintings. I agreed. Everything about them made me feel uneasy: the wide, milky eyes of three identical, cartoonish redheads emerging from the sea; a boy with his head in the sand, drowning in a foot of water; empty rooms, slightly tilted and so patterned that it was hard to tell where one wall ended and another began. Every picture I turned to intensified the feeling.
But I kept looking. As I kept looking, I began to see patterns emerging from the chaos: the redheaded child, reaching out, trapped; the waves surrounding the house on every side; the seemingly random changes in painting style, as if another artist had hijacked a corner of the canvas.
The staircases composed of thick, winding purple and green brushstrokes blended perfectly with shades of pink and gray on the walls. The barely-open, geometrical doors — painted with small brushstrokes — gave an eerie sense of doom with their muted purples, blues and yellows. Danielle Sierra, assistant professor of art, explained that Stout is an expert in color theory. Which was why the colors — though bright, bold and brash — still seem balanced.
The fact that the collection was technically sound did not shake my unease, however, especially the piece titled “Fran the Titan, John the Titanic.” The bottom section of the canvas featured the middle of a staircase, giving the sense that the viewer is halfway through ascending it. At the top was the red-haired girl, ethereal and smiling, a halo of delicate sky blue and white surrounding her curls. To the left of the staircase were waves, lit by exposed lightbulbs on the ceiling. The waves were a different style of cartoonish art, painted by a different, less bold hand.
The piece made me feel alone. I thought back to my childhood — of sitting alone in the basement watching TV and waiting for my mother to come home. I would look up the stairs often, sometimes climbing them halfway before going back down. I was unsure of when my mother would walk in and was always secretly scared that someone else would do so in her stead.
When I looked away from the painting, it was not because I did not find the art intriguing or beautiful, but because I was scared of what the painting was making me feel.
“It’s easy to feel intimidated by art,” Sierra said.
I was definitely intimidated.
Sierra, however, encouraged me to look past just single paintings and focus on the whole.
“You’ll see certain motifs show up again like the water and the doors,” Sierra said. “You can focus on those and figure out what the art is about before even reading the artist statement.”
Sierra helped me notice the wave motif throughout the collection, with thick, curved brushstrokes simulating tossing and turning. The waves ceased for nothing. Every part of the house was empty. Ominously empty. The only subject in the collection was the redheaded girl. She was often portrayed as a painting within the painting. Sometimes, she was looking at a painting of herself in the painting. It all sounds a bit like the Matrix. And that made me uncomfortable.
To cope, I finally read the artist’s statement, hoping it would contradict the uneasy feeling inside of me. In it, Stout spoke of “notions of temporality” and “nuances of reflection.”
I didn’t know what that meant.
When I called Jason Stout the next day, I didn’t want to tell him that his paintings made me feel uneasy or that I didn’t understand them. I am no art critic; I am barely an artist. Who was I to tell him that?
Instead, I asked about his journey with this project. It started with practicing still-life painting during Covid, continuing with following the news about geopolitical tensions and culminating with the 2022 deaths of two people he greatly admired: his graduate school chair, Fran Colpitt, and contemporary painter John Wesley.
Grief, according to Stout, is a lot like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The violence of grief may be minimal, but the anticipation is horrifying. Imagining a future without Colpitt and Wesley terrified Stout more than losing them in the first place.
“Sometimes when we lose things, we take for granted that they were there all this time, and then we magnify them,” Stout said. “So their absence actually makes them super present.”
Some of Stout’s paintings gave the perception of the viewer standing in a warped doorway, staring out into an empty room. Some made it seem as if the viewer was stopped in the middle of climbing the stairs — not able to go down, but unsure of what is at the top. Others showed doors, slightly ajar, beckoning the viewer into the unknown. They were all forcing me to think. They were all forcing me to change.
“Now, I’m going to ask you,” Stout said. “Are you inside the room or outside the room?”
Was I standing in the room, staring at the staircase? Was I seeing past memories everywhere, realizing I could not return to them? Was I looking on from a distance, searching compositionally for what made the painting successful?
I never gave him an answer.
Going back to the gallery, I still saw chaos. I saw the unknown, a world without my mother coming home. And it scared me. I am inside the room. Stout said that he cannot and does not want to control how others perceive his art — that their experiences with the paintings were just as valid as his own.
“It’s nice to come into a show like Stout’s without any preconceived notions,” Sierra said. “I like to experience it first and make my own connections to the work. Then I can read the artist statement, fill in any gaps, and experience it again.”
“In My Room, Alone with Everyone” will be in the Penick Academic Complex Art Gallery until October 17. Everyone should stop and look at the paintings, allowing themselves to be a part of the art. Then, they should read the artist statement before looking at the paintings again. And if that process makes people uncomfortable, good. That means they should look harder. They might just be inside the room too.
Stout did not put his art on display to invoke a specific emotion from his audience. This collection was made to make people think. It was made to make people feel.
“Every artist has 10 seconds,” Stout said. “I need to make something interesting enough for someone to stop and look at for 10 seconds.”
