Courtney Jordan
Region: South
My work deals with the mapping of industrial constructions within pictorial space. I transform man-made structures like buildings and bridges through a process of computerization, layering, collage, and painting to form my own non-existent structures. No longer useable, but still recognizable, these structures are divorced from their functionality to maintain a connection between our present experience and an alternate realm of reality. Reminiscent of our industrial world, yet also strangely otherworldly, it is important to me that these structures retain traces of their human origins, while existing only as a fragmented idealization of the "Other". The resulting images seem familiar yet alien.
Painting with ink on double-sided matte Mylar allows the image to be worked on both front and back, while the transparency of the Mylar allows for the layering of multiple sheets. The importance of layering and the resulting obfuscation of the structures shifting in space help to define their compositional significance. The use of layering in combination with industrial, mechanic and geometric elements, function as metaphors and visual devices evoking feelings of the familiar and the alien.
The work also explores the essence of solitude, isolation, abandonment, alienation and the inhospitable within the realm of human industrialization and construction. By divorcing these structures from their inherent functionality and placement in our everyday experience, I am creating images that evoke human recognition but are situated outside the possibility of interaction and co-existence with humanity. These impossible structures exist in precarious balance between their human origins and their independence as non-functioning, displaced structural objects to create a new hierarchical reality.