By: Lauri Pelissero, Public Relations

Publication: Laguna Beach Museum of Art, April 27, 1982

On Tuesday afternoon, April 27, the Laguna Beach Museum of Art received its second sculpture garden installation continuing the concept which is to feature temporary placements of large work in front of the museum, facing Cost Highway.

Assisted by crane, a 10’ x 8’ untitled, multi-positional stainless steel sculpture by artist Johanna Jordan was lowered onto the terrace as an outdoor exhibition for the next several months.

Represented exclusively in Southern California by Abraxas Gallery in Newport Beach, Johanna Jordan is most noted for her polychromed sheet aluminum forms of varying sizes which are dramatized by use of advancing and receding color combinations she achieves with bright automotive paints as a slick finish. As her individual pieces exemplify, Jordan believes the space around a sculpture exists in a state of tension, compelling movement on the part of the viewer. Moreover, the shadows cast, the reflecting surfaces, the prominences and hollows, the texture, and the attraction or repulsion of the material itself elicit responses from the body of the viewer, and gradually pull him into the orbit of the sculpture. Sculpture, then, is an art of gathering what relieves man’s apartness and alienation from things.

Jordan’s work is housed in private and corporate collections both locally (Univ. of California, Irvine collection) and throughout the United States including New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Phoenix, as well as Milan, Italy. In addition to appearing in numerous solo and selected group exhibitions, Jordan’s pieces are actively commissioned and have appeared in two Warner Brothers’ productions – one shown in Mame, and a Man. Upcoming this Fall, a manuscript on Johanna Jordan will appear in Leonardo Magazine, a periodical about art, science and technology published in Oxford, New York, London and Paris.