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Ampersand International Arts

January 16 - March 1, 2009

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1001 Tennessee Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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Semaphores Jordan Essoe, Error, 2008, Peg Board, Dimensions variable
Opening Reception: Friday January 16, 6:00-8:30pm Jordan Essoe is a San Francisco-based artist whose interdisciplinary exhibition projects focus on sociopolitical and psychological issues surrounding property, identity, exile, and war. His work has been exhibited at TART, San Francisco; The Palm Springs Desert Museum, CA; Scope Miami; 21 Grand, Oakland, CA; Intersection for the Arts and PLAySPACE Gallery (both San Francisco); Swarm, Oakland, CA; Red House Gallery, Venice,=2 0CA; Meneer de Wit Gallery, Amsterdam; Ha'Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv; and The Zebra Poetry Film Award, Berlin. His poetry and critical writing have been published nationally and internationally. Essoe is co-founder of the Humane Slaughter Acts Performance Festival. www.essoe.com Through Semaphores, Essoe explores the [re]ordering of the world, the [dis]placement of people, and the global distribution of force, wealth, and empathy. He characterizes the age of globalism in part by a latent sense of universal exile, both in the Global South and Global North. In this body of work, Essoe juxtaposes psychological exile against forcible expulsion, bridging the two by evoking a profound sense of responsibility. Semaphores is a multimedia installation that encompasses photography, video projections, collage, and materials ranging from mirrors or brown paper bags to sugar cubes. Essoe appropriates an array of media and art histori cal images to invoke complex and ambiguous relationships amongst the installation's constituent parts. A collage series depicting aerial photographs of a northwestern region of Colombia where agrarian communities are being massacred and displaced preludes a rendition of Edward Hopper's 1955 painting Hotel Window, its central figure becoming an inert and distant observer to these horrific but obscured events. Similarly, Essoe utilizes Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, as a conceptual lens for addressing the problematic of remaking the world by grand design. Inspired by the fictional society of intellectuals within Borges's narrative, Essoe initiated his own collective of thinkers to contribute to an installation of 72 images envisioning their idea of “economic democracy”. Contributors include philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, author Derrick Jensen, economist Michael Greenstone, ecologist David Wilcove, anthropologist Laura Rival, artist Ken Friedman, poet Bill Berkson, activist Sarah Anderson, and many others. more SEMAPHORES: ampersandsfwords.blogspot.com