Jake Ziemann

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

STAPLEWORK Jake Ziemann’s Staplework is an ongoing series of textile-based paintings that combine utilitarian materials—staples, mesh screen, thread, used drop cloths, paint can lids, raw linen, and colored canvas—with systems of pattern and ornament alongside abstracted landscape and bodily reference. Through repetition and layering, the work blends labor and decoration, support and status, and the industrial and the handmade. Drawn loosely from wood grain patterns, coloring-book landscapes, and fragmented bodily forms, the layered compositions are both recognizable and abstract, shifting between painting, textile, and object. Staples—typically hidden as functional support—become surface, mark, and embellishment, transforming modest supplies into shimmering lines that resemble contour drawings or patterns. Accumulated across cut-fabric supports, the stapled lines produce imagery that is at once precise and decorative, yet irregular and strange. Using materials associated with construction, maintenance, and studio labor, Ziemann’s Staplework considers how acts of making can build both physical structure and aesthetic value. Simultaneously awkward and seductive, the pieces give seemingly ordinary materials a heightened presence, complicating distinctions between craft and painting, utility and ornament. Rather than resolving these tensions, the Staplework paintings turn support into subject, rendering acts of connection as visible image and the labor of assembly as tender...

Artwork