Jordan West (b. 1969 in Wyoming, USA) lives and works in New Mexico. He is a self-taught artist who studied Evolutionary Social Psychology, Philosophy, and History at Hunter College in New York City. His work challenges notions of collective memory and place, using the painted medium specifically to provide an archaeology of the present, images devoid of human presence yet haunted by their conspicuous absence.

Jordan West’s work is a chronicle of the individual in the socially constructed, human-built, and natural environment; specific encounters of place, time, and of personal history. He works to reduce and clarify description of place and experience, a stylized representation of reality, memory and narrative, a mechanical facsimile, a simulacrum; while maintaining a reflection of the notions of fate, the sublime, isolation, dream, memory, vision, and history. Although West presents this work as a personal study of the ennui, angst, and isolation of the individual in contemporary society, culture and the built and natural environment; he endeavors to extract the self, the artist, from the work, in a minor degree, in order to present a less subjective, more neutral index of an environment, of a memory, without a complete loss of the actual experiential framework; a balance of formal reduction and empirical representation which will allow for a more generalized, expansive interpretation, and individual experience of the work, by the viewer. Jordan West makes allowances for the viewer to place themselves in the work, to introduce their own associative memories and experiences, their own notions of time and place, to create their own narrative of the painting.

JORDAN WEST