Jordan Nassar: I Cut The Sky In Two: Gallery Exhibition at 291 Grand St

23 October - 21 November 2020

  • Jordan Nassar’s hand-embroidered works address intersecting fields of craft, ethnicity and the embedded notions of heritage and homeland. Nassar uses geometric patterns characteristic of Palestinian tatreez—most often found on pillows, clothing, and other domestic textiles. The artist grew up in a home decorated with such objects. As he notes, “Growing up in the diaspora, much of Palestinian culture was experienced materially.”  


    I Cut The Sky In Two comprises two bodies of work: hand-embroidered wall works and flame-worked glass bead sculptures, a new element to the artist’s practice. Nassar’s hand-stitched imagery is stretched and framed to bring the work into dialogue with painting. His abstracted, imaginary landscapes are reflective of his own experience navigating both the physical and metaphorical distance of the Palestinian diaspora and its inherited nostalgia.

  • In a series of new sculptures, Nassar utilizes traditional glass-working techniques made famous in Hebron, a Palestinian city in the...

    In a series of new sculptures, Nassar utilizes traditional glass-working techniques made famous in Hebron, a Palestinian city in the southern West Bank. These intricate landscapes are made by wiring thousands of handmade glass beads—most of which he flame-worked himself—onto custom-built steel frames. The original object that inspired these sculptures is a traditional sconce, wherein glass beads are individually placed within a steel frame and held together by copper-coated aluminum wiring. The works are both an homage to the tradition of glass making and a contemporary envisioning of the medium as it applies to Nassar’s practice.  Each bead is a solid piece of glass, flame-worked by glass artisans in the United States and Nassar himself, who learned and mastered the technique. The beads are devised from pre-selected colored glass rods, which are melted down and shaped into individual translucent and solid beads.

     

     

  • The sculptures are named for the gates of the Old City in Jerusalem, their forms are modeled on sections of...

    Jordan Nassar's Studio, Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Roy Beeson, 2020. 

    The sculptures are named for the gates of the Old City in Jerusalem, their forms are modeled on sections of the ancient walls. In Bab Al-Zuhur (Gate of Flowers), sloping red and earth-toned hills cascade across the zig-zagging metal frame which houses the beads. Much like Nassar’s embroideries, these landscapes follow a grid pattern that is mapped out in advance. The varied opacities of differently colored beads allow Nassar to create moments of transparency that transform a solid wall into an entry point. He likens these works to portals in which the structure becomes a site for the projection of imagination, rather than simply an obscuring or delineation of the landscape.  At the same time, they evoke the long tradition of screens and transparencies in domestic spaces of pan-Arab architecture. 

  • JORDAN NASSAR, A Green Sun Before A Lunar Sun, 2023

    JORDAN NASSAR

    A Green Sun Before A Lunar Sun, 2023

    Nassar has created a series of “split-screen” embroidered landscapes with shifting colorways. Tonal changes at the midpoint of the canvases rupture and destabilize the expected horizontality of the landscape, creating space for playful juxtaposition of color and form.
  • JORDAN NASSAR, A Yellow World A Blue Sun, 2023

    JORDAN NASSAR

    A Yellow World A Blue Sun, 2023

    Nassar frequently draws upon the connection between image-making and language. The inspiration for the title of the exhibition, as well as titles of the embroidered works on view, stems from the surreal poem The Arab Apocalypse, written by Lebanese-American artist and poet Etel Adnan in response to the outbreak of the Civil War in Lebanon. The embroideries themselves are hazy and dreamlike visualizations of Adnan's poetry. In A Yellow World A Blue Sun, two skies exist simultaneously, split into two shifting yellow and blue colorways. 

     

  • Nassar collaborated with craftswomen living and working in Ramallah to create monumental, multi-panel embroideries inspired by paired elemental forces: earth/water and fire/air. The craftswomen lay the foundations of his panoramas and Nassar then embroiders multicolored landscapes within their intricate geometric grids; creating a dialogue through an exchange of visual ideas. Nassar has doubled the size of his past work to create these four-panel works, each with a patterned border that contains sections of a continuous landscape.

     

    In A Stream Is Singing Under The Youthful Grass, Nassar’s rolling green hills are stacked vertically and a peachy sky peeks out from the rectangles that house it. Nassar positioned the forms low to the ground, mirroring the elemental force that inspired the work.  Each vista functions as a window within a dense scrim of pattern, which obscures and reveals at turns. The central mountainscape straddles two panels at the centerline, existing in both spaces at once. In I Saw Tornadoes Covered With Flames, the landscape mirrors fire, the element that inspired the work. Blue and red rolling hills are lit by a purple moon, cradling a lavender crescent at it's edge.

     

  • Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in...

    Photo by Roy Beeson, 2020. 

    Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY;  Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Evelyn Yard, London, UK; Exile Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. Nassar was the subject of two institutional solo presentations in 2019: Jordan Nassar: Between Sky and Earth at Art@Bainbridge at Princeton University Art Museum and The Sea Beneath Our Eyes at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv. Nassar’s work is currently on view in the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950 - 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in the Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone in New York. Nassar has an upcoming solo exhibition at KMAC Museum in Louisville, Kentucky opening this winter. 

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