Jordan Wolfson 

Untitled, 2020

Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. Pulling intuitively from the world of advertising, the internet, and the technology industry, he produces ambitious and enigmatic narratives that frequently revolve around a series of invented, animated characters. Through his art, Wolfson probes difficult, often controversial topics and themes that underlie American culture and contemporary society. 
 
The present work relates to the artist’s ongoing series of wall-mounted brass panels featuring UV substrate prints of photographs from Wolfson’s childhood. An evolution of the artist’s ongoing series of sculptural objects mounted to the wall, the panels are the most personal that Wolfson has created to date. At the same time, by using images of himself as a child, Wolfson gives an indirect self-portrait. The snapshot attains a surreal aura while also being intimately linked to the artist’s own past and to the universal experience of nostalgia mediated through photographic imagery. 
 
In contrast to many of his works featuring advanced digital and virtual technologies, the brass panels allude to ancient metallurgy, classical sculpture, and the radiant, gilded surfaces of churches and altarpieces from the Middle Ages. Wolfson fashions the panel into the shape of a Star of David, a form the artist has utilized in several of his panel works. Though secular, Wolfson was raised Jewish, and the Star of David—a deeply iconic and historically loaded symbol—both universalizes and personalizes the piece. 
 
While multivalent and open to interpretation, Untitled can be regarded as an autobiographical statement. For Wolfson, personal and seemingly incongruous relationships between imagery and materials underscore the complex tensions and distortions the artist establishes in his work between reality and artificiality, subject and object, meaning and sense.