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

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.

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.