A tenured faculty member at The University of Alabama, Christopher Jordan oversees the photography area in the Department of Art and Art History. He earned his MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004. Projects find him creating imagery of both real and imaginary places, working with traditional, digital, and experimental photographic approaches as required. He is most interested in how photographic imagery can serve as a vehicle for reflection, memory, and meditation. Jordan’s project Suburban Sublime has appeared in the journal Diffusion: Unconventional Photography; the photography blogzine, Lenscratch; the national traveling photography exhibition, Spinning Yarns; and several solo exhibitions in the United States and Canada. Jordan’s work is held in several private collections.

Artist Statement:

With this exhibition, Still of the Night, I have expanded upon a slightly older body of work (Suburban Sublime 2009-2014), showing several new pieces. While the overarching themes of mysticism and suburbia remain the same, the pictures are becoming more specific to a story of spiritual unfolding. Most generally, these pictures place a mystical narrative within suburbia, a seemingly bland and uneventful place. Yet this very banality can incubate something curious, such as the luminous events shown in these pictures. The nature of these events is strange; they invite an imaginative leap to resolve initial perceptions.

The pictures in this series are photographs of dioramas, which I build from various materials such as photographs, cut paper and vellum. Through the play of light on vellum, I create the atmospheric effects. This work explores the ambiguity between photographic realism and pictorialism, signification and abstraction, and the ordinary versus the uncanny.

Friends Gallery / Oct 2 - Oct 31, 2017
Plaza Gallery / Nov 1 - Nov 30, 2017
Christopher Jordan