JORDAN NASSAR

In recent years, Nassar’s embroidery-focused practice has expanded to include furniture, metal, and glasswork drawing from techniques and materials used throughout the Arab world. Though materially varied, these bodies of work are unified by the artist’s depictions of imaginary Palestinian landscapes as well as his painterly approach to specific craft practices. Alongside Nassar’s vibrant embroideries, this exhibition debuts his new series of wall-mounted landscapes made from wood and hand-hammered brass, bedazzled with mother of pearl inlay.

The new inlay landscapes collectively titled Third Family continue the artist’s interest of incorporating craftwork inspiration from the Levant and Palestine. A triangle, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, and heptagon form a sequence, exploring ideas of geometry, seriality, reconfiguration, and decoration. The specificity of the woods, each one named in the materials, reads like a list of paint colours: Paradox Walnut, Spalted Big Leaf Maple, Purple Heart, Swiss Pear, Avocado, Jatoba, Padouk, Loquat, Olive.

Fraught with emotional entanglement and personal longing for place and permanence, the artist considers these landscapes, ‘versions of Palestine as they exist in the mind of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there. They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination; they are dreamlands and utopias that are colourful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.’

Meticulously fabricated by hand, with hundreds of thousands of individual stitches in each composition, the embroidered skies and atmospheric horizons in A Sun To Come seem especially remote, rural, and dreamlike. Together the pieces in the exhibition extend provocations of his work to the pan-Arab diaspora in general. By incorporating traditional forms with his unique interpretations, Nassar continues the ways in which these traditions have changed over time, bridging geographical, political, and historical expanses.

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; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Evelyn Yard, London, UK, Exile Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work was included in the group exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Dallas Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.