By: Robert Ewing

Publication: Images and Issues, Reviews, October 1982

Location: Abraxas Gallery, Newport Beach, California

At first, Johanna Jordan’s poly-chromed aluminum sculptures looked too familiar. Seeing these approximately five-by-four-foot maquettes on the floor, on the wall, and suspended from the ceiling made me suspicious about all this versatility. And references to them as “multi-positional” (they can be placed on this end or that, laid on this side or that) certainly didn’t help.

As one might expect, these works do what all constructivist sculptures do; shape space with solids and voids, invite the viewer to move around the work, and act as exemplars of pure creation. Even given this well-known mode, however, Jordan’s work still reveals character; this time familiarity breeds surprise.

As handled by Jordan, sheet aluminum becomes malleable and is cut, filed, bent, and torqued into many-angled and many-sided polyhedrons. The resulting complexity (and it is not always successful) seems not so much planned as arrived at through a constant reworking of a piece from every conceivable angle. Given any static position (the way I viewed them), the sculptures do present astonishingly different views, and they do so in a thoroughly unpredictable manner.

Jordan’s colors are sprayed on in sleek coats that further emphasize the cleanness of surface and crispness of edges. Automotive metallic sheens in low values minimize planar direction or challenge the eye to see angled abutments as flat continuances. Parallel pinstripes on these brightly colored areas, usually crossed over an angle, add additional flexions.

In spite of their industrial look, these are restless sculptures belying their physicality as static objects. They evoke an implicit feeling of original intactness out of which all their parts have been moved into a tenuous and fragile existence.

Is it naïve to make such handsome objects that ignore irony or contingency? Probably. They result from a physical rather than an ideological response to material, and they reflect deeply rooted values in our modernist ethos. Jordan’s sculptures are an endangered species in the eighties.