Patti Jordan is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist whose studio practice conflates two and three-dimensional drawing and digital processes. She has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions throughout the US, England, France, and Korea. Jordan’s most recent Solo Exhibitions include “Exposure 2021” at NYC’s Ceres Gallery and “Subfusc” at Flat Tail Press Gallery (Minot, ND) in 2019. Galleries in NYC include Leigh Wen Fine Art, La Galeria, and The Phatory, among others. Aniza Jahangir interviewed Jordan for Alfa Art Gallery, art critic Sable-Smith for No Tofu Magazine, and WMBCTV for Curious Matter’s exhibition, “The Ecstatic.” Her drawings are included in the collections of the Walter Piehl Gallery, The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, and ArtHouse 6 Gallery. She received an Honorarium for a series of works in “Lineweight,” a contemporary drawing exhibition at Truman State University Gallery (Kirksville, MO), and is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Award. Jordan lectures on visual and media culture, and her writings appear in ARTE FUSE, BOMB Magazine, Bloomsbury Fashion Central, Intellect Books, and AS/Artist Studios, among other publications. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honors from Pratt Institute and a Master of Fine Arts Summa Cum Laude from Montclair State University and is a Member-at-Large of the Women’s Caucus for Art.

“Working with ink, water, graphite, and solvent, Patti Jordan squeegees and pushes ink across the surface of large sheets of Fabriano paper. While not producing delicate, soulful swoops with a hand-held Chinese brush, Jordan pushes and pulls her medium, coaxing and building the black ink so that it results in bold, textured, and abstractly cratered and rippled layers. Creatures, bones, eyes, limbs, orifices appear, collide and condense on her horizontal and vertical scroll-like pieces, constructions of the imagination, psyche, and random gesture.”

Virginia Fabbri Butera, Ph.D. – Curator, “Pictorial Constructions” (2012)

“Patti Jordan is working in a middle realm: using printer’s inks, she pulls the ink across the paper’s surface to create beautifully rendered swashes of value and then develops them into organic images using a variety of marks and methods. She, too, often uses her work as a springboard for additional work by printing the verso, or negative image of a photographed drawing.”

Marsha Levin-Rojer – Curator, “Drawing Beyond” (2012)

ARTIST STATEMENT

I seek the regenerative through my drawing process, and in so doing, both the external and internal forces during formulation become intertwined. In the initial stages of image production, I’m pouring and pulling ink across a smooth paper surface with a large metal rule; amid application, I allow gravity to assist in generating discrete forms that traverse my substrate. Science is connoted through recurrent imagery resembling hybrid specimens of plant life, insects, and bodily viscera. This repetitive action and its ensuing elements intimate the layering of present experience over indeterminate histories and play between the extremes of the living and the dead, the animate and the reliquary. Fluidity as a construct is then channeled as an end means of the symbolic, signifying embodied presence.

Titles are often comprised of verb and noun, linking process to an action and the resulting image to an object or “bi-product” of the primary action. I generally denote classifications after the phrase to underscore the scientific references and to subvert any laden emotions implied in the initial catchword. These dual-coded messages, including the visual/verbal exchange between image and text, create undercurrents of meaning that inscribe more complex textual experiences. The direct relationship between text, the rendered image, and viewer is then emphasized.