To Harden and Heal: Jodi Hays

Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present To Harden and Heal, our first solo exhibition of works by Jodi Hays, an Arkansas-born, Nashville-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice mines painting, poetry, reclaimed materials, and rural crafts. Opening Friday, May 9, the exhibition focuses on the last five years of Hays’s work—a period marked by a deepened transformation of everyday materials, especially cardboard and textiles. Her process is tactile and slow: surfaces are dyed, sewn, collaged, and weathered. The labor shows. These aren’t paintings in the traditional sense, but dense, built objects—at once tender and exacting.

Though the works are grounded in Southern material culture, they push outward, refusing nostalgia or regional cliché. The detritus is specific—drawn from the South—but the gesture is broader, more American. These are the leftovers of a place and a people, reformed and re-seen through the lens of abstraction. Hays doesn’t illustrate the South; she distills it, making room for contradiction and nuance, irony and affection.

To Harden and Heal points to a dual movement in the work: a hardening of soft materials through time, labor, and process, and a healing – a marriage of histories through transformation. These pieces speak a global language of abstraction, but with an unmistakable accent—drawling, inventive, and unshy about color or surface. Somewhere between Gee’s Bend and Ruscha, Bradford and Johns—inflected by Southern poetics and a restless experimentation, Hays carves out a space that is distinctly her own.

Pentecost by Jodi Hays constructs a towering work from dyed cardboard, ribbon, denim patches, and cyanotype, evoking both the scaffold and the sanctuary. Named for its verticality and quiet reverence, the piece channels a ritual intensity—where labor becomes liturgy and material transforms into metaphor.

Canaan hovers between figuration and abstraction, suggesting something animal-like—part gesture, part silhouette. Its ambiguity is intentional, inviting multiple interpretations rather than a fixed reading. The composition holds a charged stillness, balancing expressive energy with quiet restraint.

The title evokes the layered symbolism of a promised land—historically and spiritually loaded, both longed for and contested. Here, Canaan becomes less a place and more a proposition: about where we come from, what we carry, and how we define home in shifting terms.