DUET

PAMELA JORDEN

EXHIBITION DATES:
NOVEMBER 2 - DECEMBER 16, 2023

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its sixth solo exhibition with Los Angeles painter Pamela Jorden. There will be an opening reception for with the artist on Thursday, November 2nd from 5:00 - 8:00pm.

My paintings are improvisations and layered compositions. I often create ruptures in my work through compositional breaks or by putting two separate frames together to form a diptych. I like to think about bringing multiple points of view into an image, so while there may be a fracture, the paintings are also “at once” or simultaneous. The paintings settle into a complete state when they feel like they contain a logic that is particular to the piece, but also when it feels like it could keep moving.

Jorden’s exhibition, Duet, presents an installation of six paintings that continue the artist’s exploration into dualities and opposing forces. Working with diptychs, Jorden plays with the idea of visual counterpoint and the impression of tension that it creates within the pictorial field. Within each painting, two sides join or push against one another creating an energy and simultaneity that invite reflection. Some pours and marks serendipitously flow between the two halves of the paintings while others create breaks and ruptures. The results are a series of dynamic works on linen that offer two perspectives at once and vibrate in concert together.

The collaborative movement of dance and musical improvisation have long influenced Jorden’s practice. Listening to interviews with contemporary composers, the artist considers the ways in which sampling, translation, processing, harmonics and dissonance relate to the way she thinks about abstraction. Similarly, Jorden’s performative approach to painting, which involves stretching, pulling, pushing, leaning, and turning, closely parallels the sharing of weight, touch and movement awareness in dance. Her contact interaction with the painting is truly a somatic effort between herself and the canvas. At 72”, each piece demands engagement of Jorden’s full reach, and the physical space her body inhabits. The result of the activity is a cohesive whole that is deceptively effortless.

The paintings start with a shape or a frame, layered with colors, and evolve extemporaneously as the paint moves and reacts in the space of the canvas, working with or against the limitations it encounters. Multiple color chords of paint with varying optical densities - layered, slowed down, accelerated, manipulated, emboldened - mingle with shape, line, texture and pattern to the orchestra of the whole. Pigments, suspended in water and solvents, interweave with the texture of the linen and freely do different things. Colors “break” into separate hues and then bleed together in unexpected and surprising ways; pigments separate and coagulate into fades and blends; pools of paint gravitate to the edge – bound by or spilling over. Jorden, by engaging with this chance and improvisation in relationship to the geometric structure of the frame, gives over to the autonomy of the paint and allows for its unpredictable movement and synergistic flow.

Pamela Jorden (b. 1969, Knoxville, TN) received a BFA from the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN) in 1992 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) in 1996. Jorden has had recent solo and group exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York, NY); Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Brennan & Griffin (New York, NY); Seterah Gallery (Düsseldorf, Germany); Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); Mason Gross Art Gallery at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Pamela Jorden’s work is included the collections of Abroms- Engel Institute for the Visual Arts/University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL); Columbus Museum of Art/Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN); Fidelity Collection (Boston, MA); New York-Presbyterian Hospital (New York, NY); Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI). Jorden's work has been written about numerous publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Art in America. Jorden lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.com or 415.550.7483.