SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Romer Young Gallery welcomes back Pamela Jorden for her second solo exhibition at the gallery. Jorden’s exhibition Monte Vista to Central presents a new series of paintings that continue to engage in an experimental observation of the transitory nature of light and color.
Monte Vista to Central, the title of an earlier painting, spanned the time that Jorden had a studio on Monte Vista Street until she moved to Central Avenue. The title alludes to two different locations, but also to different perspectives. Her paintings respond to the space she lives and works in - the natural effect of changing light, the atmosphere, the density and geometry of the city, the collision of nature and the urban, concrete landscape.
"My paintings straddle a line between an interest in literal or "pure painting" properties in the realm of abstraction and a relation to landscape (physical environment) or other pictorial references…It interests me to explore how a color can work in a painting, how I can undermine and alter its intensity, or how a color relationship can create a vibration and tension that keeps movement happening in the painting."
Jorden is interested in the movement of color, its optical phenomenon, and its transformative potential. In this new work, color is both material and physical. With weight and energy, paint flows over raw linen surfaces, and washes of pigment soak into the weave of the fabric. Within and between paintings, bright spectral colors transform into more earthy, muted, and transparent tones. These color shifts give the effect of atmospheric perspective and play with the way color appears to change at different times of day. Open spaces collide with density; presence and disappearance are simultaneous. The experience of Jorden’s paintings is also activated by and relies on movement. For example, when a viewer walks by and observes from a particular angle or from straight in front of the painting, the silver may appear bright white or a neutral gray depending on how light falls across the surface.
With the shaped canvases, Jorden explores the primary painterly concerns of flatness vs. illusionistic space and the materiality not only in paint handling but in the shape, scale and sculptural qualities and objectness of a painting. Fluid pours of paint flow over and wraps around the frame of the stretcher, thus interrupting the geometry of the painting. She creates a tension between the flatness of a painted surface and a deep illusionistic space. This figure ground tension, the capturing of losing of structural form, is related to Jorden’s interest in the subjective and phenomenological experience of a painterly space.
Pamela Jorden was born in Knoxville in 1969. She received her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1992) and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1996). Jorden has had solo exhibitions at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY, David Patton Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Mason Gross Art Gallery, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ), and London Street Projects (Los Angeles, CA). Selected group exhibitions include NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today at the Pizzuti Collection, Samuel Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Forms of Abstraction at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, CA, The Working Title at the Bronx River Art Center, NY; Themes and Variations, New Abstraction in Los Angeles at the Torrance Art Museum, CA; (Keep Feeling) Fascination: Recent Abstract Painting in Los Angeles, Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA. Jorden lives and works in Los Angeles.
