Jordan Martins

Cartoon Aporia

jordanmartins — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:59:33 +0000

This is the absolute best pop-culture/curatorial tumblr I have seen so far: http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/

John Divola

jordanmartins — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:48:42 +0000

I just discovered John Divola’s website, which is an impressively comprehensive archive of his work going back to the 70′s.

His very early Vandalism series is a favorite of mine, and I think it is as significant in the context of painting as it is in photography.

Studio Archive #3

jordanmartins — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:20:38 +0000

Studio Archive #2: Taxonomies

jordanmartins — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:53:46 +0000

Back from Tennessee

jordanmartins — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 02:05:31 +0000

Spent a little over a week with Angela’s family, some of whom were involved in a revived hog kill tradition that used to be commonplace. Last year they started using the old smoke house–which hadn’t been used much since the 80′s and still had several hams hanging from that era–for curing ham and bacon, both of which tasted great this year.

We also went on some great walks around the farm with Angela’s dad, who showed us among other things a small and overgrown graveyard with some gravestones from the mid nineteenth century. Other highlights included 30 or 40 wild turkey’s going crazy, piles of bones in the woods near the cattle farm, and surveying the flooded areas around the creek that’s been flowing a lot higher because of some recent rainfall.

Studio Archive #1

jordanmartins — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:30:32 +0000

I have several hundred books in my studio that I pull images from for my two dimensional work, as well as several unwieldy piles, drawers, boxes, and provisional stacks that all add up to a system of sifting and sorting. For the most part, images end up in these piles because they resonate with what I’m working with. Many don’t end up being used (at least right away) and, because I think they’re weird or otherwise interesting/attractive, I’m starting a series of “Studio Archive” posts highlighting some of my favorites.

Thank you, hypothetical reader, for allowing me to breach the solipsistic world that is my studio.

Casta Paintings

jordanmartins — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:10:27 +0000

…from colonial Mexico mostly. Showing different combinations of races and their offspring.

Getting ready to teach Art of the Americas again next semester (with an emphasis on the colonial era). Full of crazy shit like this.

Joseph Yoakum (1890-1972)

jordanmartins — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:35:03 +0000

I first saw Joseph Yoakum’s work at Intuit, who I believe has a pretty huge collection of his work. Yoakum starting drawing very late in life, and was “discovered” even later (I think he was in his seventies), in part because of interest in his work from the Chicago Imagists.

All of his work consists of landscape drawings of specific places, with the name of the location written on the work. Many of the places he rendered were far away and exotic, and he claimed–implausibly–to have visited them all at one point. This makes the psychedelic qualities of these landscapes all the more interesting. Each seems to be operating on a weird spatial logic that conflates dimensions and melts different elements together into coalesced heaps of form.

Indians, Spaceships

jordanmartins — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:58:20 +0000

Here’s a small selection of some of my “early work” (1986 – 1993)

Philip Kwame Apagya

jordanmartins — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:15:46 +0000

Philip Kwame Apagya is a Ghanaian photographer who is known for his portraits of people in front of idealistic painted backdrops. From what I understand he is coming out of a widespread commercial portrait tradition where this kind of thing is common practice, and in some cases people are having portraits like these made in a consciously funny/ironic way, similar to the well worn trend here of the retro Sears portrait.

I didn’t get the chance to see his work when it was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography last year, but I really love these images for their simple juxtaposition that forcefully opens up a whole interpretive territory surrounding identity, consumerism, colonialism, etc, etc.