Jordan Sears, The Shape of a Second
Painters Painting Paintings
May 14–June 14, 2025
Jordan Sears’ paintings emanate fluorescent ennui. Like a corrupted floppy disk or a VHS tape that has warped with age, the artist’s paintings sit at the edges of familiarity, saturated with disquiet, nostalgia, and a distinctly feminine sense of performance with its corollary feelings of appeasement and anxiety. At once implying instances of heightened emotions, the works also feel strangely remote, like stills from a film half-remembered, compelling in their distance and haunting in their restraint.
Sears lifts found images – film stills, screenshots, listings – and decontextualises them, sitting with them for weeks or months until they accrete into paintings. These isolated images are then cropped, manipulated, and distilled into compositions, their remnants rendered in resonant oil paints. Building colour in layers over two or three passes, Sears’ palettes are created using the raw luminescence of the canvas to create a sense of submerged radiance, an intensity rendered purely through restraint.
Much like the work of Cindy Sherman, Sears’ practice plays with the idea of femininity and archetypes. The works metonymically focus on small details which imply larger, unspoken emotions. Works like Glimmers of Stardom and Stage Glow evoke a distinctly feminine, internal dialogue – a discord between what is felt and what is shown. Small details such as a halo of illuminated hair under stage lights, and a visage with starred eyes disguising inner turbulence bespeak the cultivation of beauty under duress.
In situ
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Jordan Sears, The Shape of a Second
Painters Painting Paintings
May 14–June 14, 2025
Jordan Sears’ paintings emanate fluorescent ennui. Like a corrupted floppy disk or a VHS tape that has warped with age, the artist’s paintings sit at the edges of familiarity, saturated with disquiet, nostalgia, and a distinctly feminine sense of performance with its corollary feelings of appeasement and anxiety. At once implying instances of heightened emotions, the works also feel strangely remote, like stills from a film half-remembered, compelling in their distance and haunting in their restraint.
Sears lifts found images – film stills, screenshots, listings – and decontextualises them, sitting with them for weeks or months until they accrete into paintings. These isolated images are then cropped, manipulated, and distilled into compositions, their remnants rendered in resonant oil paints. Building colour in layers over two or three passes, Sears’ palettes are created using the raw luminescence of the canvas to create a sense of submerged radiance, an intensity rendered purely through restraint.
Much like the work of Cindy Sherman, Sears’ practice plays with the idea of femininity and archetypes. The works metonymically focus on small details which imply larger, unspoken emotions. Works like Glimmers of Stardom and Stage Glow evoke a distinctly feminine, internal dialogue – a discord between what is felt and what is shown. Small details such as a halo of illuminated hair under stage lights, and a visage with starred eyes disguising inner turbulence bespeak the cultivation of beauty under duress.
In situ
Painters Painting Paintings
May 14–June 14, 2025
Jordan Sears’ paintings emanate fluorescent ennui. Like a corrupted floppy disk or a VHS tape that has warped with age, the artist’s paintings sit at the edges of familiarity, saturated with disquiet, nostalgia, and a distinctly feminine sense of performance with its corollary feelings of appeasement and anxiety. At once implying instances of heightened emotions, the works also feel strangely remote, like stills from a film half-remembered, compelling in their distance and haunting in their restraint.
Sears lifts found images – film stills, screenshots, listings – and decontextualises them, sitting with them for weeks or months until they accrete into paintings. These isolated images are then cropped, manipulated, and distilled into compositions, their remnants rendered in resonant oil paints. Building colour in layers over two or three passes, Sears’ palettes are created using the raw luminescence of the canvas to create a sense of submerged radiance, an intensity rendered purely through restraint.
Much like the work of Cindy Sherman, Sears’ practice plays with the idea of femininity and archetypes. The works metonymically focus on small details which imply larger, unspoken emotions. Works like Glimmers of Stardom and Stage Glow evoke a distinctly feminine, internal dialogue – a discord between what is felt and what is shown. Small details such as a halo of illuminated hair under stage lights, and a visage with starred eyes disguising inner turbulence bespeak the cultivation of beauty under duress.
In situ
