“Breading” is not a word often associated with artistic technique. And neither are oatmeal or quinoa often cited as media for use in painting or sculpture.  Nonetheless, those have been central to Jonah Jacobs’ abstract sculptural practice for 19 years.  And he’s been in a lot of group shows and juried shows, and even won a lot of prizes, including the Viewers’ Choice award at CAN Triennial 2018, the Curator’s Choice award at the (Kettering, Ohio) Rosewood Art Center’s 2017 Juried Sculpture Show, and Best of Show at the Waterloo Arts juried show in 2016. In fact his current show at Kaiser Gallery—Dreams Never made My Bed, on view September 12 through October 5—is his 100^th show.

As much success as he’s had in juried and other group shows, solo shows and sales have been hard to come by. He says prior to showing at Kaiser, his last solo show—at the long defunct William Rupnik Gallery—was a dozen years ago. Sadly, it will also be the Tremont gallery’s last. Proprietor Tanya Kaiser announced that her venue will close after this exhibition.

Jacobs is a self-taught artist. He studied philosophy at Antioch College.  It’s easy to connect the process of philosophic inquiry to the nature of his sculptural practice: What makes something valuable? What dictates the materials we use to make sculptural art? Why are clay, wood, or marble acceptable, while other substances that have mass and form are not? Sure, there are answers, but they inevitably lead to more questions.

The core of Jacobs’ process is approximately as complicated as breading chicken: he starts with a carcass of a crumpled cardboard box or cup, or perhaps a structure laboriously constructed of 100 or more layers, or perhaps just a slab of cardboard. He might then shape it by grinding or using fire as a sculptural tool. When the form is right, he “breads” it, using adhesive to stick on a coating of milled oatmeal,  quinoa or couscous to create a near-colorless texture that will absorb his vividly colorful dyes. The materials appeal in several ways. The cardboard is free and often found, discarded. And oatmeal and quinoa, besides being readily available, are cheap. From an artistic perspective, they hold dye exceptionally well, which is important because the richness of the color is such a big part of the works’ appeal. As Jacobs says, they “suck it up.”

Finally, the materials –largely recycled, also biodegradable—have minimal impact on the planet.

These works are significantly about the surface and the rich color, but there’s much more to the process than that. He sometimes adds glitter, or other embellishments: glass beads, or tinted cotton swabs by the thousands, or little nipples of fabric paint. Individually, these elements look like delectable treats in a confectioner’s window. Some of the large pieces are made from dozens or hundreds of individual breaded, dyed, and embellished elements, such as the focal piece of the show, Meristem, a square accumulation wherein they begin to look like tastebuds on a tongue that has been licking a rainbow ice cream pop. It’s approximately four feet square, the whole surface covered with individually breaded, tinted, embellished pieces about the size of toilet paper tubes—which is what some of them are, underneath all that.

Other pieces—such as the sea-form like Ciliophora #1–are made from hundreds of layers of corrugated cardboard, cut in a form and adhered one layer at a time in cross sections, accumulating like rings of a tree, and then ground to a smooth, organic shape. Ciliophora #1 is also embellished along a cavity with perhaps 1500 dyed cotton swabs.

Still other pieces are smaller and simpler, but no less intriguing in their creation. Untitled, they are mounted on panels: individual pieces of cardboard sculpted with fire before the colorful breading treatment. To Jacobs, the fire is a random, but controlled organic force interacting with his work and to some degree creating it.

It’s abstraction, but the different works bring to mind certain forms, and they are absolutely not without meaning. There are several that have the sea-form like quality of Ciliophora. There were even more like that in Jacobs’ recent group show (Transcendent Terrains, with Sarah Esposito and William E. Ward) at Context Fine Art. That show featured a whole series of made from coffee cups, presented together like a chorus of coral growths on the sea floor: all the sopranos, basses, altos and tenors gathered in a mob and shouting their synesthetic colors.  In those groupings, Jacobs says, he sees them as living things in competition with one another.

At Kaiser, in Dreams Never Made My Bed, two pieces are discernably built on the form of cardboard cigarette packs.  Jacobs recalls that after his father passed away, he had found both the last pack of cigarettes his dad had started before dying, as well as what would have been the next, unopened. The ones used in the pieces on view at Kaiser are not those particular cigarette boxes, but the association is there.

These kinds of associations, combined with the discarded and by any measure near worthlessness of the materials in his work, are emblematic of Jacobs’ thinking about value. Of course regardless of material, it’s the artist’s thought, process, ideas and investment of labor, and the audience’s appreciation of that, which creates value. “Why do we value a Gucci bag?” he asks rhetorically. “Art is weird because it works on all these different levels of value. It is the ultimate status symbol.” Alltogether, Jacobs’ work is like a philosophical inquiry about beauty, status, permanence, impermanence, and of course value, carried out in sculptural forms rather than words.