Jordan Rountree

Los Angeles-based artist Jordan Rountree (b.1990, France) joins the group show “Of Mighty Winds and Downy Flakes” curated by Mirjam Pajakowski.

 

"Of Mighty Winds and Downy Flakes" is dedicated to winter – as a natural phenomenon and climatic condition, as the dark season, as a cultural image. It appears in many shapes in the group show: as a »phantasm« that has been – and continues to be – reinterpreted time and again in myths, customs, and artistic explorations over the centuries.

 

How can art today create spaces in which these aspects are negotiated beyond romantic idealization or escapism? In the rooms of Reformator, visitors encounter a field of tension between tradition and the present, between natural metaphors and material reality.

 

This exhibition brings together sculptural, graphic, and pictorial positions from six contemporary artists: Nadine Baldow, Ralph Hauser, Mirjam Pajakowski, Olga Pfeffer, Jordan Rountree and Constanze Victoria Thieleke. They confront and engage with this reality. The different materialities of the works such as latex, wood, ceramics, canvas, or feathers – are understood not only as carriers but as active agents. Each material brings its own resonances, resistances, and surface qualities and therefore their interplay creates a network of physicality and symbolism.

 

At the same time, the sound of colors plays an important role: through their atmospheric vibrations, their relationship to one another, and their character as carriers of meaning, a color space unfolds that oscillates between magical charge and sensual perception. In this show, color appears like an echo of ancient rituals, a reverberation of hope for light, growth, and the cycle of the seasons. This tension is intensified in the pictorial representation of darkness and light. Darkness is not understood as emptiness, but as a fertile space in which transformation becomes possible – as night, from which light emerges. The light itself bursts forth in fine layers, reflections, and overlays, as a silent announcement of a new beginning.

 

Although the participating artists come from very different regions – from the Alps to eastern Germany, Finland, Tatarstan, and the USA – they share a common experience: the seasons with their recurring atmospheres, customs, and rituals. In all these geographical spaces, forms of cultural memory have developed over the centuries, which the artists wish to examine from a contemporary perspective in the context of the exhibition.

 

Jordan Rountree will open the exhibition with his performance CHTHONIC ARCHIVE No.7: Extremities.

 

With his seventh CHTHONIC ARCHIVE entry titled “Extremities”, Rountree brings his Pop Noh style to Europe for the first time, exploring the world of a New England boarding school student who collapses in the snow, feigning unconsciousness to avoid a failing grade and potential expulsion.