Courtney Jordan

painting / drawing

email : courtneyjordan@earthlink.net
web : www.courtneyjordan.net

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about the artist / work

Through my drawings in ink and graphite on mylar, I attempt to rethink and re-imagine architectural forms and structures from the human-built environment. By manipulating and recombining familiar elements from urban areas and industrial infrastructure that are encoded with social and emotional values, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. My goal is to lead us to re-evaluate our sense of place in this energetic and overbuilt, complex world.

Percy Shelley wrote in Defense of Poetry that poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare [its] naked and sleeping beauty." Poetry, he continues, "makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents." I attempt to strip away the veil of familiarity from known structures to reveal our deep emotional connectedness to the built forms of everyday life in which we live, move, and believe, while opening the door to other realms of reality.

Working 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, helps to define their compositional significance in an otherwise vacant landscape. These impossible structures exist in precarious balance between their human origins and their independence as nonfunctioning, displaced, structural objects, evoking feelings that are simultaneously familiar and alien.

bio

Courtney Jordan earned her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Hoffberger School of Painting, in 2006. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. She has held several residencies, including a summer fellowship and residency at the Fine Arts Work Center, in 2006; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005; the Mac Dowell Colony in 2000; and Oxbow in 1996.

Courtney was the recipient of a 2008 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and an Individual Artist¹s Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in 2004. Her first solo exhibition was held at Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea, NY, in 2003. Her most recent solo exhibition, "Restructuring," took place at Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC, in 2007. Her work has been included in multiple editions of New American Paintings magazine; books 20, 44, and most recently book 69, published in 2007. Her work is in the corporate collections of Pfizer and Swiss Re. She is currently represented by Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC.