Jordan
McKenzie

Look around you.

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How can our response to this madness be anything other than incoherent? The sense making bonds have snapped, leaving us with an abject disequalibrium. 

My paintings are materially and visually promiscuous, employing the traditional materials of paint, canvas and drawn marks, but also non-traditional ones such as photographs, plastic bags and aluminium packaging.  

My practice operates as a kind of three ringed circus. I start by making daily auto-drawings, spontaneous, quick outpourings, some of which become translated into paintings.  Text works act as a counter-balance to both my drawings and paintings, employing humour, social comment, cliches, political slogans. Then the paintings, surreal impossible spaces that create visual and conceptual dizziness. The plates are all spinning at once…

Drawing aesthetically and conceptually from Dada and punk, my work is a response to experiencing the vertigo of living in the now. Post-truth, cat memes, planetary collapse, AI slop, how do we negotiate this collapsed space of meaning? We are living with and through non-sense. The surfaces of my paintings are knackered, just holding on, ripped, torn, collaged, attempting to hold information/image overwhelm. There is no 'my work is about', no stable signifiers, no fixed point of communication but instead a scrambled, anxious response to ethical/political/cultural chaos. The trivial is mixed with the politically charged, the profound with the cliched, one liners with sophisticated thought. 

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Painting for me is the fractured moments of bumping into the world and the world bumping into me