JORDAN SULLIVAN

DESERTSCAPES, BIRDS IN FLIGHT, ABSTRACT SUNSETS: JORDAN SULLIVAN STRIVES FOR A "POETIC REALITY" IN HIS ART

INTERVIEW BY NATASHA YOUNG MARCH 15, 2020

Jordan Sullivanis the kind of artist you can’t pin down to a single medium or style. Since 2010, he’s exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Spain, Japan, China, and beyond; published more than 20 art books or zines; been featured in numerous publications, includingThe Paris ReviewandThe New Yorker; and, somehow, found the time to write a novel. Sullivan is best known for his photography, but he’s revealing his paintings to the world for the first time.

“The photographs became my livelihood, but I’ve always been making these paintings that were rougher around the edges. I just thought, ‘fuck it,’ after you and I did that show in July (“Return of Polite Society”). This is the work I want to do. This is what gets me up in the morning,” Sullivan told me over the phone from his home in New York.

Sullivan’s paintings are visceral, like devotional art or cave paintings. They imbue a little hope into humanity, celebrating the multicultural makeup of America vis-à-vis empathetic explorations in the historical consciousness of the working and immigrant classes, particularly in Detroit and Los Angeles.

Let’s begin with where you’re coming from, both as in your backstory and your artistic practice. I was born in Houston, Texas, raised in a small town in Ohio and in Detroit. Since I was 21, I’ve lived in London, Los Angeles, Texas, and New York City, where I’m currently based. I worked lots of odd jobs before being able to make art full-time. I’ve been a construction worker, waiter, dishwasher, graphic designer, and artist assistant over the years.

Place features predominantly throughout your work, but your new paintings show a pivot from the natural environment—desertscapes, birds in flight, abstract sunsets—toward urban environments and the people who inhabit them.On a basic level, my work has always been an exploration of my surroundings, some sort of attempt to try and find a little meaning. Richard Ford used the phrase “poetic reality,” and I think I’ve always strived for my art to exist in a space like that. Most of the new work is about LA or Detroit.

I really miss LA all the time. It’s a huge inspiration for me still, particularly downtown LA. I had a studio on 3rd and Broadway for over two years, and I lived in it for most of the time I was there. I found downtown LA similar in certain aspects to Detroit. My family still lives in the Detroit area. I was there all of September

at the Popps Packing artist vresidency. There was a brief moment of almost coexistence in Detroit before the riots when people of different races and cultures were thriving together in one city, in close proximity. Something painting can do is bring people from different backgrounds into this space of coexistence, which doesn’t really exist at all in cities today, but I feel like maybe somehow it could, so this is my attempt to put some hope into these pictures. That was the starting point that got me interested in painting this kind of figurative work: wanting to make images of people coexisting.

Would you say that comes from a place of optimism, or just wishing society would get better? Yeah, wishing things were better. I don’t think I’m very optimistic, but I’m hopeful. I think there’s a difference.

There’s a distinct symbolism throughout your paintings – like in one painting which is, interestingly, structured in panels almost like how a comic book structures a narrative. There’s the card suit on a checkerboard, the bowl of fruit, the sign: “Elvira’s Wedding Chapel, Bridal & Quinceaneras.” That’s the front of my studio in Downtown LA. The man with the bird on his hat, he used to hang out outside the studio; the woman selling bags in the foreground has been

"NOTHING IS JUST ONE THING"

working on the block for 14 years, she’s someone I said hi to every day. That’s a real place, Elvira’s Wedding Chapel. This dude Willy runs it. I’d say a lot of the work is some combination of autobiography, history, and fiction.

I’ve never been interested in comic books, but the panels go all the way back to the old religious art I got into as a kid, 11th century stuff—I grew up Catholic, so a lot of the first art I saw was, like, the Stations of the Cross, or stained-glass windows, and devotional paintings. The bowl of fruit in the Elvira’s Wedding Chapel painting is an example of how one thing can take on multiple meanings, and become a sign or a symbol. I try and look at all these elements in the paintings and consider their connotations, consequence, and context. There’s a certain artistic responsibility in that sense. Nothing is just one thing.

The paintings are certainly more apparently personal and vulnerable than your photographs. All of my work has been pretty personal, though. I’ve said before that my landscapes are self-portraits, but I don’t think anyone really cared. When I had just gotten to California, I was not in a good place, so I went out to Death Valley, the lowest point in North America, and made those pictures. The distant and lonely mountains, the faded colors, that was me then. There was a garden series I did shortly after that, right after my grandmother’s funeral, in a field behind her house. Those were printed on translucent silk. They were landscape images that became ghost portraits of her. Very rarely has anyone shown interest in the autobiographical aspects of my photography, and that’s totally fine. But when you start painting – painting people, specifically – there starts to be a question of who the painter is.

Could you tell me about the meaning behind some of the symbolism in the paintings? Let’s go back to the “Elvira’s Wedding Chapel” work. I wanted to present what that corner in Downtown LA felt like. Grand Central Market is across the street, so during the day, the block is flooded with all walks of life. At night it empties out and the sidewalks become beds for the homeless who can’t or don’t want to find space over on Skid Row. It’s a poem of a street, and in the paintings, I wanted to show the sort of joy and desperation of that block. The people looking out of the painting, they look concerned—uncertain. They are looking at you as if they’re asking something of you. I think Downtown is asking a lot of questions. The whole place is gentrified. People are being displaced, discarded, thrown away really. It’s unbelievably tragic on Skid Row. But Downtown is such an incredible part of LA, historically. It’s the beginning of LA. Today, it embodies everything that is awful and beautiful about the city – all the hope, the broken promises, and desperation. So maybe the people in that painting embody the concerns of the neighborhood.