Jarrett: Can you talk about your piece “Compliments and Disasters”?

Jordan: It’s about a dialogue between client and designer, or father and son, stranger and stranger, brother and sister, boyfriend and girlfriend, or whatever, two people essentially. It eventually just becomes about the high and lows of having relationships, the push and pull, and the stories that come out of it having many different types of relationships. The work on the wall acts as a visual representation of the those relationships, like if you laid out a book or article about what you think your subconscious might be dealing with when you are in a relationship. The edits and revisions all laid out, ready to rework and re-examine.

Jarrett: What’s the background story behind “I Love Temptation,” the piece you created for Arkitip magazine?

Jordan: Hehehe, no heady answer here, every issue Arkitip asks a couple of artists to send in a piece of mail art. I was curious to see if I sent ten different envelops, all with a dollar inside if they would make it to Arkitip. I would tempt whomever by putting the dollar in an envelope with a clear address area so the dollar would be visible. Seven of the ten pieces made it to them. Either, three people gave into the TEMPTATION and took the money, or they just took the money cause they figured if you’re dumb enough to send cash money thru the mail, then you’re a dumb-ass and deserve to get it taken.

Jarrett: That’s what I thought…just curious how many made it through ;)

Jarrett: There seems to be a fair amount of editorial surrounding some of your recent work. Is writing something that interests you or is taking a bigger role in your art pieces (I’m looking through “Reviewing the Interviews; Opportunities for Sublimation”)?

Jordan: Yes, I dunno if I would really call it writing, more bits and pieces of dialogue, heard and made up, if you could “Photoshop” writing that would be what I have been doing. A lot of it has to do with certain characters that come in and out of my life, i’ll remember conversations and then take large amounts of liberties when recounting them…all goes back to the infamous fish length stories “that fish was 2 feet if he was an inch” shit like that…

Jarrett: Talk about your piece for the Big Brother magazine/Human Brand Event. You’ve combined photography with typography on a larger scale. Do you think you could take this idea further?

Jordan: The benefit/event was held to help skaters in Philly raise money to build a new skate park. Most skaters will know there is a place in Philly called Love Park, there has been a battle between the city and the skaters for the last 15 years over skating in Love Park. It got to the point about a year ago that the city fenced in the whole park so no one could even get into it, whether you were skating or just walking through it. It’s just a funny situation, so Philly courts the X-Games and you hear the mayor talking about how good it will be for the young people in the city, and yet the people that live and skate in the city can’t even skate in the city without getting a ticket. The work was homage to a place were many of us over the years gathered and had some of the best times of our lives.

Onto the second part of the question. Yes, this is definitely a direction I want to keep going in. I’m interested in the idea of repetition and how it affects the different meanings of work. For me, when I look at works that utilize elements of repetition especially when it’s one image over and over again I really start to morph my reading of the image. The image eventually becomes and changes into something completely different, as a direct result of that constant reinforcement of that one image. Then, in my case, to throw in typographic elements it adds a completely different dimension. You now are dealing with elements that have universal definitions. The word “dog” is spelled out D-O-G it means dog we all know what that means, it doesn’t mean car. But say if we take the word “dog” and put it up on the wall and make it out of pieces of paper with pictures of mountains over and over, the whole work now changes and becomes open to viewer interpretation.

Jarrett: So where to from here?

Jordan: Upcoming; a remix project of sorts where both Graphic Havoc and Mike Cina of WeWorkforThem take a number of prints I did back in ’93 – ’96 and add their own unique work to the prints, with the final work to be shown in a gallery space.

Jarrett: Sounds great. Well that just about wraps up my line of questioning ;) Thanks so much for your time and patience on this Jordan+

Jordan: Thanks for the email fun Jarrett.

Jordan Crane

01 | 02 | 03