PAMELA JORDEN
FOREST
OPENING RECEPTION:
SEPTEMBER 18TH, 2:00 - 5:00PM
EXHIBITION DATES:
SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 30, 2021
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its fifth solo exhibition with Los Angeles painter Pamela Jorden. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, September 18th from 2:00 - 5:00pm. There will be a live performance with Gabie Strong, LA based performance artist at 3:00pm. Visitors will be required to wear a mask at all times and capacity will be limited to 6 visitors.
Pamela Jorden’s exhibition Forest presents an installation of six diptychs, densely installed within the gallery space. Totemic, like trees, the verticality and scale of these new paintings present an encompassing effect, a feeling of being surrounded. Jorden’s dynamic use of the frame introduces thoughtful new ambiguities in the figure-ground relationship, suggestively and simultaneously relating to landscape and the human form. The result is an inspiring and contemplative experience of space.
Resisting depiction in favor of slow suggestions, Jorden draws color and form from everyday experiences and subtly offers them up as abstractions. Composed of multiple color chords with varying optical densities and accumulations of shape, line, texture and pattern - each mark becomes an isolated experience adding to the synthesis of the whole. Colors are arranged and bleed together in unexpected ways; pigments separate and coagulate into pours and fades and blends. “I respond to certain colors emotionally, especially highly saturated blues and reds. In the field of a larger painting, color is as active as a gesture, moving and directing me through a painting.” The works balance a play between foreground and background, void and form, light and dark, hard and loose, positive and negative.
A recurring theme in Jorden’s practice for the past decade - the cut and rupture in her compositions - is pushed further in this body of work by the physical divide between two parts and the introduction of negative spaces in several paintings. Each diptych becomes a harmonic-friction of two shapes pushed together, creating a center line that is at once literal and implied- two separate forms join in an interdependent union. This compositional rupture draws the focus towards the verticality of the forms while also inviting movement and interaction.
A long history of painters who worked on shaped canvases and off the frame can be seen as inspiration - Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, Frank Stella, Mary Heilmann, Al Loving - to name a few. Jorden, alongside these artists, creates works that are architecturally sensitive,blurring the line between painting and sculpture. Shaped frames allow Jorden to play with dynamic movement within and beyond the paintings. In concert with the movement of the paint as it bleeds, spreads, flows, the shapes similarly push and pull against each other. Together, the paintings vibrate in concert with one another.
Pamela Jorden (b. 1969, Knoxville, TN) received a BFA from the University of Tennessee in 1992 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1996. Jorden has had recent solo and group exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York, NY); Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Brennan & Griffin (New York, NY); Seterah Gallery (Düsseldorf, Germany); Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); Mason Gross Art Gallery at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Her work has been featured in numerous publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Art in America. Jorden lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
EXHIBITION IMAGES:
