SUN DRAWING WATER
Pamela Jorden

May 25 - June 24, 2017

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Sun Drawing Water, our third solo exhibition with Los Angeles artist Pamela Jorden. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, May 25, 2017, from 6-9pm. 

The circle: microscopic or telescopic, either way it designates a fixed-upon spot that needs her focus or a detail of something that extends and may be unbounded.

The round framing device is a graphic lasso, holding the eye’s attention and concentration on a particular, magnified visual zone. That steady zone is a porthole onto shapes swimming in a larger sea—landscape or vortex. On parade, a world passes by in front of these unblinking oculi. We always only see a small part of something larger. Or, alternately, the circle bounds an experiment in growth like a petri dish, a germination habitat where marks bloom, multiply, and spread. An outward, centrifugal flow of ripples and rings. Or, the “O” of Orphism is a synesthetic glory hole and booming boom box. Sonic dimension echoes and reverberates spherically with lush tonalities: expanding and overlapping sound waves, a sonar ping, a banged gong, the pulsing diaphragm of a speaker. The acoustic sun, moon, and foghorns Arthur Dove painted resonate here in the art historical distance. Glowing-light atmospherics, like a stoplight in the fog or a spectral prism: halo, softness, astral fuzz, haze, and shimmer. The metallic glitter and faint iridescence in some paints she uses (the silvers, with mica flakes) are precisely unphotographable—even as, on a certain level, hers are paintings about vision in (or defiantly in spite of) this age of cameras and roboticized lenses.

- excerpt from Adjusted Foci: Pamela Jorden Starting Points by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer.

Pamela Jorden’s paintings encourage a phenomenological experience of painterly space defined by color, mark, composition, and light. In this recent group of paintings, Jorden continues to work onto raw and bleached black linen stretched over circular or idiosyncratically shaped stretcher frames. Washes of color, influenced by gravity, viscosity, and the chance interaction of wet into wet paint, traverse the geometry of the frame as blurred, atmospheric flows. Compositional ruptures in the paintings, as well as fragmented and layered areas of chromatic dispersions, reflect Jorden’s interest in the collage of texture and density in the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Lines, like contrails crossing the sky, become multiple horizons as paint moves in many directions through the field of the painting. The irregularly shaped frames disrupt linear perspective offering a subjective viewpoint: from within, looking outwards, in many directions at once.

Jorden received her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1992) and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1996). Jorden has had solo exhibitions at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York, NY); Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA); David Patton Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Mason Gross Art Gallery, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Selected group exhibitions include Around Flat, Knockdown Center (Maspeth, NY); NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today at the Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, Ohio); Alice Könitz, Pamela Jorden, Jeff Ono at Samuel Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Forms of Abstraction at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (Irvine, CA). Her work has been reviewed in numerous print and online publications including Art Forum, Art in America, ArtNews, Artcritical, and ArtPractical.

Pamela Jorden 2004 – 2014, Black Dog Publishing, 2015