Jordan Kasey at Nicelle Beauchene

Artist: Jordan Kasey

Exhibition title: …animal, vegetable, or mineral? / From Dust We Came

Venue: Nicelle Beauchene, New York, US

Date: February 15 – March 17, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene, New York

…animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce …animal, vegetable, or mineral?, Jordan Kasey’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will consist of 7 large-scale paintings and will run concurrently with From Dust We Came, an exhibition of new works on paper by Kasey on view by appointment only at Third Floor.

Continuing to expand upon the figure as a site to obscure and disarticulate the standard mechanics of time, allusion and representation, Kasey’s bodies act as objects within ambiguous settings that pose more questions than answers. Simple, straight-forward, familiar-feeling compositions give way to psychological tableaus implying that even the most basic of observations are up for debate. Fluid and subject to interpretation, the figures are often anonymous and stone-faced, yet remain imposing and emotionally charged.

Kasey’s characters function as if they were cast into a dream or memory, staged in liminal scenes both formally and psychologically. Laden with inertia and floating out of context, images appear to fossilize through their static state—the impression or aura remains, but the original is gone. Variations in color, both in the darkness of the shadows and the brightness of a windowsill or pattern of clothing, activate an image that is at once playful and sinister; apathetic and dynamic; fleeting and permanent.

From Dust We Came

Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to announce From Dust We Came, an exhibition of new charcoal on paper drawings by Jordan Kasey. The show will run concurrently with …animal, vegetable, or mineral?, on view at the main gallery on Broome Street.

From Dust We Came is an installation by Kasey with drawings of faces borrowed from stone and clay sculptures from various cultures of the ancient world. These faces, which spent thousands of years staring into the darkness of the earth from which they were rendered, have been reimagined as portraits, which hang throughout the apartment on brightly hued walls. The character’s expressions are subtle but absurd: an icy scowl, a stoned-looking grin, or a look of pure shock as though captured in the moment Medusa herself glanced their way. Cumulatively, these charcoal on paper works could almost pass as photographs of long-forgotten family members. Set in a domestic space, an unlikely family reunion takes shape with new voices to tell their myriad stories.

To gather source material for the works, Kasey spent time at museums and libraries in New York City, Baltimore, and Peru. She paid particular attention to expression and vitality while sketching and photo-graphing the sculptures, usually enlarging the faces to many times their original size. Each portrait is ren-dered from “prolonged staring matches,” as the artist describes, with an empathetic hand that amplifies the reverence originally imbued in these figures by their no-longer-known makers. Since being exhumed from their resting places, these faces have waited wide-eyed in vitrines far from home. Distinct from the artist’s painting practice, the drawings re-animate a chorus of culturally anachronistic “artifacts.”

Jordan Kasey (b. 1985) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from the Maryland In-stitute College of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Greenpoint Termi-nal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Michael Jon Gallery, Miami, FL. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; White Cube, London; Kate MacGarry, London; and Loyal Gal-lery, Stockholm.