Jordan Tate Visits the Big Apple for Recent Exhibition
March 15, 2017 by Caitlin Confort
Jordan Tate is an artist who doesn’t use Instagram filters. #nofilter
He’s a Cincinnati resident who works as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Cincinnati – although Jordan is an art professor, he did not have a traditional art school experience. His focus was more towards critical thinking, critique, and deconstruction so he has always approached art from that paradigm rather than a formal or medium specific model.
Tate’s work is currently held in impressive collections nationwide, including Rhizome at the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Fred and Laura Bidwell Collection, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and additional galleries in the USA and Europe.
We have our artful eye on Tate’s recent exhibition Prefaces, which marks the third time he’s exhibited at the Denny Gallery in New York. This collection is easily the most personal work he’s ever made. Kierkegaard’s Prefaces, which is comprised of introductions to unrealized novels, functions as the inspiration for Tate’s series by the same title. According to Denny Gallery, Tate inverses this equation—creating final documentation for projects that have never existed in our present reality.
Art Zealous chatted with Tate about his influences and more about Prefaces. We’re super excited to see what he gets up to next!
Art Zealous: Influences?
Jordan Tate: As far as influences go, I could list a number of artists over the years whose work I felt a resonance with – but I’d also say that I’m much more influenced by the internet at large that any individual or photographic genre/sub-genre. The internet has been a constant, engulfing, and powerful influence.
AZ: How did you first get into art & photography?
JT: I received a Pentax K-1000 as a gift when I was a teenager and as the cliché goes – it changed my life.
AZ: If you could choose an Instagram filter for your life, what would it be?
JT: I have to confess that I don’t use Instagram to post images in the traditional sense. They always go through Photoshop and then to Instagram so I don’t know any of the filters or their effects. As far as I know, there isn’t anything Instagram can do the Photoshop can’t.
AZ: Currently listening to?
JT: Sylvan Esso (literally right now, I’m on a plane on the way back from NYC). I’ve just opened a solo show at Denny Gallery in the LES titled Prefaces.
AZ: Drink of choice?
JT: Rye whiskey and Sour Beer (I’m also an avid brewer).
AZ: Tell us about your ongoing research concerning the visual and conceptual processes of image comprehension.
JT: I would say that this is more related to earlier works. Prefaces denotes a significant shift in my practice (maybe away from the research on process and effect and towards work that questions its effect).
AZ: Tell us about your show @ Denny Gallery in NY.
JT: Prefaces runs from 1/26 – 2/26/17 at Denny Gallery (261 Broome Street in NYC). Below is a phenomenal text by Justine Ludwig, Director of Exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary which has been excerpted from the second volume of the books (published by Lodret/Vandret) that accompany the exhibition.
“Jordan Tate’s Prefaces is driven by the potential of the unrealized. At first glance Tate appears to have one of the strongest exhibition histories of any contemporary artist. It boasts installation shots of the Swiss Institute in New York, Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, Wiels in Brussels and even immaculate depictions of his work hanging in the Guggenheim. This is all artifice. These images are Tate’s latest body of work titled Prefaces. For this series, he has constructed various works and then taken on the role of curator and created exhibitions. While composed solely in digital space, they read as pristine installation documentation, taken in physical space. In these photographs, light veils of shadow fall on perfect white walls and mirage-like reflections spread across high-shine gallery floors. Tate harnesses the power of the white cube as a validation, as a signifier of what is art of value. ”
The show and books are the culmination of 18 months of work and I couldn’t be more pleased with the dialogues I’ve had already regarding the show.
AZ: What can we expect to see from you in the future?
JT: I like to mix it up with each new body of work so I haven’t settled on anything new yet, but I know at least in the meantime it’ll be more politically engaged. I also run an art book press with another artist, Amanda Curreri called Special Collections. The press is fairly new, but it is a socially engaged artist-run collaborative platform that does everything in-house on a Riso. We’re taking a bunch of books down to Material Art Fair in Mexico City in a couple of weeks.
AZ: Instagram handle?
JT: @portablehammer