NYAB Event - Jordan Kantor Exhibition

Jordan Kantor Exhibition

Churner and Churner

This event has ended.

Churner and Churner presents an exhibition of works by San Francisco-based artist Jordan Kantor. It is his first solo exhibition in New York in 5 years.

For the exhibition, Kantor has produced Les Meules, a 16mm film that takes Monet's haystack paintings as its impetus and visual content. Comprised of over 1,400 photographs of the impressionist's paintings and projected at the same size as the original canvases, Les Meules presents an image of the temporal changes in season and time of day brought up to mechanical speed; color changes now arrive through camera settings and monitor calibrations rather than the location of the sun. Digital images of the paintings culled on-line have been turned into single frames in the film, and thereby returned to physicality and to the photographic process that was a principal concern of Monet and his contemporaries.

This transition--from painting to photograph to film-still--is then further mediated, as Kantor produces new paintings from color-inverted photographs. The new paintings maintain the 3:4 aspect ratio of 16mm film, and reference Les Meules in their vibrant color palette, only in the end to frustrate their references to the natural world. For as in his previous Lens Flare series, the paintings are freeze-framed instants, visible only via a technological apparatus: the lens flare as an effect caused by the refraction of light through a camera's lens, and the manipulation of colors as a Photoshop tool.

Like many of Kantor's previous paintings based--including, most explicitly, those based on X-rays of Edouard Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère, these new works are concerned with the formal conventions of European painting and the technological mediation and appropriation of images. As one critic has written, Kantor's paintings "convert one medium's incidental marks into another's intentional gestures," producing a technical and conceptual register of the original image.

When in 1891 Monet exhibited fifteen paintings of haystacks, friend and critic Camille Pissarro wrote that the paintings "breathed contentedly"; the interchangeable and repetitious nature of the paintings, their sameness in difference, is given a faster breath in Kantor's artwork, fueled by the reciprocal interaction between film and painting, digital and analog, and the mechanical and the handmade.

Jordan Kantor (b. 1972) has had solo exhibitions at Ratio 3 in San Francisco (2010; 2008), Art Statements at Art Basel (2009); and Artists Space, New York (2006). His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. Kantor earned a BA in History and Studio Art at Stanford University in 1995 and a PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2003. He has been awarded the Pioneer Art Award (2010) from ArtNow International / Kadist Art Foundation, and the SECA Art Award (2008) from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art He currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

[Image: Jordan Kantor "Untitled (Lens Flare 8017)" (2009) oil on canvas, 21 x 28 in.]