Jordan Brown is an artist and performer based in Chicago, IL. His interdisciplinary work in sculpture, installation and performance meditates on queer Blackness and abstraction, often using found objects, old clothing, and text. He collects hats and umbrellas, which sometimes find their way into his work. Jordan is one-fourth of the Black performance artist collective Suspended Culture.
Influenced by story quilt traditions, fashion, cartoons, and collage practices, I work with old clothing, fabric, text, and found objects to create ephemeral installations, sculptures, and performances that double as scenes from my own mythology as a Black queer human. The materials are sourced primarily from my own archive–sometimes literally, in the form of outgrown clothing, old sketches, or diary entries, and sometimes more poetically, in the form of objects of memory, or things I recall from dreams. My practice of fashioning objects, installations, and figures from these materials is a way of grieving past lives, but also of imagining future selves and/or unwritten stories. My works perform urgency but also transience and fluidity, as they operate as the evidence of “what was” but also “what will be.”
Conceptually, my work is an investigation of queer Blackness and performance as they relate to time. I think of Blackness as accumulation–of potentialities, of loss, and of multiplicities–and of queer Blackness as its shadow. Performance, for me, is a method of navigating those potentialities in real time. Along the way, performance allows me to give structure to the materials through small, quick decisions. To prepare for the moment of creation, I gather objects from my own past and my imagined future to improvise with in the present. What emerges are maps of relations that perform a circular time structure, using my memory and imagination to navigate. In this sense, my work is Afrofuturist, and I am deeply inspired by the work of the Black Quantum Futurists, Sun Ra, and Toni Morrison.
My work is both playful and dark, often leaning into cartoonish depictions of body parts, faces, and contorted figures. I use childlike, simple imagery, rhyming text, and bold, primary colors to mask the real darkness of the work, which is about the necessity of grief and the labor of imagination. I try to create work that is open enough for the viewer or audience member to start to remember something, or to start to dream, and then to question the distinction. As an artist, I try to keep myself on that boundary, which may contain the truth.