Jordan Martins
Chicago, IL
Jordan Martins (b. 1979) is a Chicago based visual artist and musician, whose practice is based in collage processes, painting, and photography.
MessageJordan Martins (b. 1979) is a Chicago based visual artist and musician. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil in 2007. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Stove Works, Goldfinch, The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Zeitgeist, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was recently featured in volume 155 of New American paintings. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisciplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. From 2013-2025 he was the director of Comfort Station, a multidisciplinary art space in Chicago, IL.
Statement
I see the logic of collage as the overarching principle that runs through my visual practice, which encompasses painting, photographic processes, installation and performance. Much of my work has in fact has used the literal building blocks of collage--glued fragments of paper--but I see a deeper resonance in the term “collage” as a way to point to processes of translation and disruption that images go through: the ruptures that occur when something is removed from its context; the reactions that arise when it is grafted onto another system; how the “edges” of these interactions engender different results if they are smoothly cut or jaggedly torn, seamlessly integrated or bluntly repelling each other.
My core research at the moment involves recursive looping between photographic and painting processes: painted objects that become photographed, photographic fragments printed/painted/torn, ad hoc collages of these fragments arranged on flatbed scanners, and inkjet printed canvases of these scans functioning as starting points for oil paintings. This promiscuity between analog/digital, photographic/painted, and ordered/unhinged in my own practice is also what excites me about the broader state of painting in our current moment.
Powered by Artwork Archive