Weathers, Pamela Jorden’s 8th solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, opens on October 21st. During the past 20 years, Jorden has pushed her abstract painting practice in bold directions, forging her way through explorations of how a painting takes form and through the challenges of reaching each painting’s potential – from construction of stretcher support to application of paint. Here, the title Weathers refers to forces of nature: pressure, movement, change, atmosphere, place, land, and entropy. The term, when used as a verb, also brings to mind one’s psychological endurance in our time.
Each two-part piece in the show is at a large scale (some as large as 80 inches in diameter) making the painting process intensely physical. Paintings are created by tilting and turning the canvases in the studio – flat and upright, together and apart – allowing for gravity and the paint’s viscosity to determine wide marks. Further evidence of physicality can be seen in visual moments of pushing, pulling, smearing and wiping away as the paint moves across the canvas. There is an element of chance in this process which Jorden welcomes; the paintings evolve as each layer of the paint is applied in relation to the previous.
Choosing to work in diptychs allows Jorden to consider dualities and opposing forces in the work. Her approach parallels the dance practice of Contact Improvisation; an exercise where dancers move and react in a space collaboratively, working through limitations of the body and resulting in unexpected movement. The ruptures in her compositions where canvases join and paint diverges become consonant with these gestures, creating a sustained experience of discovery for painter and viewer alike.
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); Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Brennan & Griffin (New York, NY); Setareh Gallery (Düsseldorf, Germany); Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH; Mason Gross Art Gallery at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ); Channel to Channel (Chattanooga, TN); Her work has been featured in numerous publications such as Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Observer, and Artnews.
