Jockum Nordström: Why Is Everything A Rag

Why Is Everything A Rag is the first solo museum exhibition of the Stockholm-based artist Jockum Nordström in the United States.

Children’s books, jazz and blues vinyl covers, collages, drawings, paintings, and paper sculptures collected from the start of his career through today figure in a practice animated by and built of visual vernacular. Inhabiting liminal spaces heralded as much by surrealism as by folk traditions, Nordström looks to the cultural, psychological, and physical margins of society. Positioning his audience as voyeurs—into derelict buildings, soundscapes, and private lives—Nordström uses the idea, as much as the aesthetic, of outsider art to develop an oeuvre of outlines—physical perimeters, cut-outs and scraps—creative edges of civilization.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website