Jordan Bernier: New Waves at Nudashank successfully combines two seemingly very different bodies of work: the intricate drawings long associated with this artist and new experiments with technology hinted at in his installation at Baltimore Liste at The Contemporary Museum last spring.
Jordan’s graphite drawings assert the primacy of the artist’s hand and eye. Highly structured and patterned like his more familiar pen-and-ink drawings, these are simply made—graphite on paper, period. Each drawing is comprised of a multitude of small individual gestures, short lines placed side by side or one on top of another, not continuous lines, but broken, reiterative strokes.
In a series of drawings identified simply as Lines, these gestures settle into a series of bands, sometimes thicker or thinner, in some examples horizontal in orientation, at other times tilted up and down, so that you feel that something has slipped.
The edges of these rectangular compositions have a rippled character, a little like they have been torn or perhaps woven with the raw edges of warp and weft left visible. In fact, much of Jordan’s work seems to allude to textiles from around the world, whether the patterns of Oriental carpets, crocheted afghans, or flattened Japanese kimonos. Grid, a rather baroque interpretation of the minimalist format, culminates at its upper edge with crenellations not unlike the pointed pleats of a schoolgirl’s skirt.
A number of abstract drawings create spaces that are slightly disconcerting, suggesting recession and movement. Zig Zag constructs a dizzying maze that rises upward precipitously. Tunnel recedes to a distant passageway defined by ever-narrowing concentric rectangles, their edges surprisingly in their unevenness, another reminder of the handmade quality of these works.
The undulating lines in Waves will make you blink. For a moment, I became convinced the paper was actually warped and that this must really be just another one of the rectilinear lines on buckled paper. A series of Stacksrepresent uneven rows of geometric shapes that rest uncomfortably, one on top of another, some closer to collapse than others. These are like fantasy block-building projects ran amuck.
One of Jordan’s largest drawings, Fill, is so densely covered with black and blacker bands of drawing, some glistening with graphite, that that you feel as though you are peering between the stalagmites of a dark cave, deep within the recesses of the earth. You need to get close and let your eyes adjust to the darkness of this work, but once you do, you will be drawn into this mysterious space.
Three of the video pieces seem closely allied to Jordan’s drawings. Black and White Drawing, displayed on a small television screen, records the progress of a drawing or its erasure in monochrome silhouettes created using stop motion animation. Another bank of 30 small monitors, five high and six wide, plays photographic images of his drawings, their colors creating rectangular columns of patterns not unlike Grid. Cube Installation zeros in on just one three-dimensional shape—it could have been pulled from any of the Stacks—and empowers us as viewers to make it move and change its color and orientation based on your relationship to it. A small, unseen camera plots your position and causes the cube to morph.
http://www.vimeo.com/30094703Computer Lab Installation captures a late-night performance in a darkened computer lab at Towson University. A shadowy Jordan moves among two dozen bright white screens. As he turns each monitor on, it chimes and glows with color—fuchsia, yellow, blue—and occasionally, broad brushstrokes of color sweep across their screens.
A MICA grad, Jordan is now working on his MFA at Towson University. I can’t wait to see what’s next. But in the meantime, stop by at Nudashank, on the third floor at 405 West Franklin Street—and hurry, it’s nearly sold out!
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 
