Jordan Martins

Region: Midwest

 My core practice involves recursive looping between photographic and painting processes: painted objects that become photographed photographic fragments printed/painted/torn, ad hoc collages of these fragments arranged on flatbed scanners, and inkjet-printed canvases of these scans functioning as starting points for oil paintings. This promiscuity between analog/digital, photographic/painted, and ordered/unhinged in my own practice is also what excites me about the broader state of painting in our current moment. I see the logic of collage as the overarching principle that runs through my visual practice: the ruptures that occur when something is removed from its context; the reactions that arise when it is grafted onto another system; how the “edges” of these interactions engender different results if they are smoothly cut or jaggedly torn, seamlessly integrated or bluntly repelling each other. I’m curious about the perceptual dynamics that affect how a viewer reads the outputs of these processes, and this has brought about an interest in Gestalt psychology, theories of camouflage, issues of signal-versus-noise, fugue structures, signaling theory, and hallucination.