Jordan Martins: Plant Strategies

Plant Strategies, Jordan Martin’s first solo exhibition at Goldfinch, features new paintings that build from Martins’ ongoing Phenotypes, an ever-expanding series of monoprints that create a feedback loop between assemblages-photographs-collages-scans and inkjet prints, with the final output always being a unique archival pigment print. Martins’ new paintings extend the feedback loop one step further; here, Martins builds off the imagery of the Phenotypes by printing images on canvas and then painting directly around and on top of the printed imagery, so that, in Martins’ words, “the painting begins more in medias res than tabula rasa.”

The forms and gestures that are present within these paintings also reflect Martins’ interest in dazzle camouflage, strategies of conspicuous visuality, and the ways in which a painting might deploy or reflect them. 

“I’m often trying to create a field of vision that simultaneously obfuscates visual readability (through disruptive patterns or using ‘decoy’ marks and colors) and directs attention in a very bold way. Like a zebra. I’m also interested in the way that the camouflage question overlaps with the process of [making] imagery that is inkjet printed and imagery that is painted. At certain distances, it’s difficult to tell what is what, i.e. is the paint camouflaging the digital-photographic process, or is the digital-photographic process camouflaging the paint?”

Image: Jordan Martins, Oxbow I, 2018. From artist's website