FALLING, FLOWING, STILL
PAMELA JORDEN

Opening Reception: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2:00 - 5:00pm
Exhibition Dates: NOVEMBER 2 - DECEMBER 14, 2019

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition with Los Angeles artist, Pamela Jorden. Falling, Flowing, Still features four, six-foot tall diptychs on curved and angular geometric stretcher frames. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, November 2, 2:00 - 5:00pm.

Jorden’s newest paintings gesture towards landscape, movement, and time. Neutral brown linen, reminiscent of the color of the sandy soil of Southern California, serves as a ground for layered washes, spills, and fades that recall atmospheric conditions. Particles of pigment disperse across this ground like the sediment in alluvial flows, leaving behind a textured history of movement. Through pouring oil washes over pools of acrylic paint, Jorden records her bodily relationship with the painting process. The paintings are indexical markers of what has been stretched, pulled, turned, and absorbed. Fluid and organic, the result is a reassembly of a dynamic landscape of shifting focus conveying the immediacy of granular detail and the vastness of geologic time.

The surface of the pictorial plane contains the organic and fluid energy of the paint, while the shape of the frame embodies movement and gesture, often suggesting a distorted perspective. These paintings forsake the standard rectangle as well as the brushstroke to allow a less predictable outcome. Each diptych becomes a harmonic-friction of two shapes pushed together, creating a center line that is at once literal and implied. Where the two planes touch, the liquid trajectories of color that have stained the canvases disappear into (or seem to rise and spread out from) the fissure. Jorden’s active modulation of these outcomes permits her paintings to spatialize time.

The title of the show is inspired by Nancy Holt’s writings and Jorden’s experience of Holt’s Sun Tunnels - an installation that appears both diminutive and large-scale in Utah's Great Basin Desert consisting of four, nine-foot tall concrete cylinders aligned to frame the sun on the horizon during the summer and winter solstice. These static cylinders provide an ocular register for a phenomenological engagement with the transitory atmospheric conditions of the location.

Pamela Jorden lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1992 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1996. Jorden has had solo exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York, NY); David Patton Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA); and Mason Gross Art Gallery, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Selected group exhibitions include The Day in the Night: Pamela Jorden and Katy Cowan, Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Around Flat, Knockdown Center (Maspeth, NY); Take up Space and NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today, Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, Ohio); Alice Konitz, Pamela Jorden, Jeff Ono, Samuel Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Forms of Abstraction, Irvine Fine Arts Center (Irvine, CA). Her work has been reviewed in numerous print and online publications including Art Forum, Art in America, ArtNews, and ArtPractical. A monograph, Pamela Jorden 2004-2014, with an essay by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and a conversation with Kaveri Nair and Alice Könitz has been released through Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery and Black Dog Publishing.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.