Everyone Is Bad
Jordan Strafer Interviewed by Isis Awad
Video still: Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 2 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
Jordan Strafer is one of my best friends. I think of her (and annoy her) like a sibling. Below is a conversation with Jordan in her kitchen in Bushwick, where I finally got to ask her things I’ve always wanted to know.—Isis Awad
Isis Awad: Would you describe your work as autobiographical or journalistic?
Jordan Strafer: Definitely. Everything I make is autobiographical. The narratives in my work are derived from my life. Sometimes I think about the difference between memoir and autobiography and how truth is subjective and relative. There's an emotional truth to a story or a memory that isn’t objectively what happened.
IA: So a memoir to you has more wiggle-room for subjectivity, in terms of truth, versus an autobiography?
JS: I think so. I would describe my work as existing between both.
IA: Your work is personal, but you also don't really give any details.
JS: I give my Social Security number. It's in my artist's statement. You could steal it.
IA: PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure) was the last work I saw of yours in person. It was a two-channel video installation exhibited as part of In Practice: Total Disbelief (2020) at SculptureCenter, New York. Can you describe the work?
JS: PEP is a collage of events from my life and from the media that I've consumed. The script was initially about a teenager getting sent to a behavior modification camp. While I was writing it, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings was happening. She moved me and I worked it into the larger narrative. The script is a mix of sources including Blasey Ford’s testimony, Anita Hill's testimony from 1991, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) (which has always really interested me), the transcript from these psychological training tapes known as the Gloria Films (1965), and quotes from Sigmund Freud's Dora Case Study, when Freud described Dora’s dreams.1 Whenever I write scripts they include a variety of sources that I fit together to tell a story that tells a version of my story. I take quotes and collage them together. I often take out all the nouns and replace them, kind of like a Mad Lib. That's how I write my scripts.
Jordan Strafer, Contract death, 2020. Death certificate, inkjet print staple, pen on onionskin paper. 11 x 8.5 inches
Video still: Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 1 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
IA: What is PEP about?
JS: Some of the things it's about is truth and justice and the instability of victimhood or villainy, and how those two positions are interchangeable. One of my goals in that piece was to not have a victim. Although the female doll character is in a victim’s position, I didn't want her to be a victim. Maybe the better answer to the question of what it's about is that everyone is bad.
IA: Period. You often collaborate with and cast your friends in your videos. Do you prefer to work with people who you already know and are comfortable with?
JS: When I started making videos, I only cast myself. And then in graduate school, I began making videos with my dad and his husband. And part of my thinking for those choices was that I feel very sensitive about representing others and identities. It also has to do with the overarching idea that everyone is bad. So, if I'm showing evil in some form then I want to take responsibility for that depiction, and the only thing I can speak to is myself. I don’t want to implicate any specific identity or anyone else's representation in a position of wrongdoing.
IA: So you play all the evil parts?
JS: In a sense, yes. Partially, I’m very aware of looking as a potential form of violence, and I'm also just the most available. It was the same with casting my dad. I'm thinking about patriarchy. There's something really simple about literally casting my own father. When he died, I decided to cast friends as versions of him or myself using various forms of masks. After he died, the depiction of ‘father’ got more monstrous. To me, part of making the work is the energy during shooting and the psychodrama that ensues when you make your best friend make out with your boyfriend, or whatever. To me, that helps the energy of the piece. On another note, this is why I'm interested in masks and dolls as a way to not represent other people and to be as sensitive as I can be to how troubled figurative representation is, especially in film or photography.
IA: Before filming, do you give your cast a briefing of what the video is about? Or do you just hand them the script? How did you direct PEP?
JS: The way I direct is I envision different poses, like choreography, and the text always plays a huge part. I usually don't have the text, or script, spoken out by the actors. I make a shot list and choreographies to do over and over again and I have the actors pose like dolls or mannequins. I don't have a naturalistic way of directing. At least not at this point. The people in PEP were my boyfriend at the time, and my friends Zacry Spears and Carl Knight. To film the live action scenes, we took a trip upstate for a weekend and shot it. I had a storyboard that I drew out with reference images. I think everyone got the general idea of what we were filming and the feeling that I wanted, but even I didn't know what it would be about at the end. I was just in the middle of making it.
Part of what's nice about working with friends is I can ask them, “Can you act out this movement again, like this?” And then we try again. Like we're hanging out and making images together and I don't feel the pressure to explain what it's about, or I don't feel embarrassed to direct them, and I think that makes for better work. Then they have ideas and it becomes a collaborative process and it feels really comfortable. It’s also what my resources allow. If I had the resources to hire good actors, maybe I would. For PEP, I think it was much better to keep it interpersonal and hoping that through that, the result would evoke emotion, even though no one is actually a good actor.
IA: Can you tell me about the cake in PEP?
JS: PEP consists of two channels: a main channel and a companion channel. The cake, which appears in the companion channel, is kind of like a mood ring for the main channel. It's supposed to be a diorama of the murder scene, or attempted murder scene, taking place next to it. It was a fully edible red velvet cake made with frosting and candy, which I melted to make a red Jolly Rancher river. My friend and collaborator Chloe Cerabona was the genius behind the jolly rancher river. There were a lot of scenes where it was getting sliced and eaten that were never used in the final cut.
Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019
Installation view, SculptureCenter, New York (Photo: Kyle Knodell)
Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019
Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
Channel 1 of 2
Channel 2 of 2
IA: I think that a level of humor really comes out in your work, which makes it all the more jarring because the subject matter feels dark, or like it’s coming from a dark place. Would you describe your work as camp? Or kitsch?
JS: I would happily embrace describing my work as camp. I think my work is also funny because it's really fake. Fake as in alienated or really artificial. Even the more horrific scenes in my videos feel really alienated and it is funny. I hope it's funny.
IA: I found it funny, and so emotional. Do you intentionally strive for your work to be accessible through emotion?
JS: I wouldn’t want to make something that isn’t emotional. I am most touched by art that makes me feel something. And since I’m working with my own emotions and life story, hopefully my work can act as a metaphor for other workings of the world. The ultra-specific can become universal code. Although I am by no means an expert, I am interested in psychoanalytic theory for this reason: everything operates symbolically. I enjoy thinking about things like the family unit, for example, as a stand-in for the way someone interacts with the rest of the world—whether or not it is literal, like father for patriarchy, gay father for double patriarchy.
IA: Whoever is watching can identify with what they’re watching in whatever way they want to. They see what they want to see, or they see what they feel. But do you want viewers to feel something specific?
JS: I just hope they feel something. That’s part of why I’m engaging with narratives of victimhood or wrongdoing, or the good and bad. I don’t really think there is a “right” side to choose in the story. Especially if it’s a story from my life, the last thing I want to do is make the character that represents me the innocent one.
IA: Even if you’re witnessing a murder, that's just what’s happening. It’s not necessarily good or bad.
JS: In PEP, for example, the two gay dads try to murder the teenager. You can see them as villains, but they're also the only characters that express any intimacy or love or have a private moment in the whole video. They share the most tender moment and they perpetuate the most violent moment. They're the only ones whose subjectivity is revealed at all; the only ones with live bodies, basically. The ‘victim’ cries at the hearing and tells a story that's actually very vague and nonspecific. She's made out of an altered fashion doll. She's sympathetic, but also not. She's blond and she comes from a privileged background. I try to move away from any kind of purity.
Jordan Strafer, WORKOUT, 2020. Inkjet print, ballpoint pen, tape on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
IA: Who are the artists, dead or alive, that you feel your work is inspired by or in line with?
JS: I think of art like other forms of scholarship. It builds upon itself and others. For me, the goal would be to make a contribution to that lineage. I don't know if it's up to me to say whether I'm in that lineage, but I think of artists like Ellen Cantor and Eleanor Antin and Lynn Hershman Leeson and other artists like Carol Rama, Lygia Clark. Especially Lygia Clark's relational objects. Obviously, Andrea Fraser. Lutz Bacher is one of my favorite artists.
Ellen Cantor I learned about for years working at Participant Inc. She had recently died when I started working there and Lia Gangitano, Participant’s founding director, had a lot of Ellen's personal belongings. One of the projects Lia had me work on was to archive Ellen’s things. Going through her stuff, I felt like I was getting to know her after she died. I felt very close to her looking through her personal notebooks and her computer and touching her clothes and her couch and then watching her work and going in her Vimeo account, looking at all her drawings. I felt an intimacy with her and to me, that's the best connection to have with an artist is to know them personally. I felt like I befriended a ghost. I think a lot of my favorite artists that really touched me have also died. Maybe I'm guilty of some kind of veneration like that. I am very romantic and idealistic about what art does or can do and I think that being an artist can be a really painful thing and it has destroyed a lot of people, or people have died too soon. That's what touches me the most.
IA: Would you want people to have access to you like that after you die?
JS: I hope that before I die, I throw it all out [laughs]. No, maybe I would keep my notebooks. I don’t think I would mind someone finding my notebooks. I just hope that I would make an impression on someone the way Ellen has on me. That to me would be success.
Jordan Strafer, White Pearle, 2020. Pencil, pen, sharpie, colored pencil, white out, post-it, inkjet print on onionskin paper. 11 x 8.5 inches
Jordan Strafer, The Continuum, 2020. Inkjet print, pen, marker, white out, post-its, glue on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
IA: What do you consider to be the first artwork you made, that you would proudly call your first artwork?
JS: In high school, I was in a darkroom photography class. I really wanted to be in the advanced class but I never took the beginner class. And I asked my roommate in boarding school to show me all the stuff that you learn in the beginner class in the darkroom so I could lie and get into the advanced class. We went to the darkroom late one night and she showed me everything. I don't know why I wanted to do it so badly. And the project that I did in that class was I painted my friend's faces to look like old people with white paint and I drew on wrinkles and I had them pose with hamburgers. It's funny, I saw these photos recently when I was cleaning things out and it looks just like my work now. I was only 18 years old. I’d never made that connection. But to be really honest in answering your question, I still don’t feel like I’ve yet made that artwork that I can call a complete artwork that I am proud of. I just always feel like I have a lot more to do.
IA: How many hours per week do you work on your art?
JS: I guess when you have a practice like mine, everything you do is part of your work. Art can be so insidious and cannibalistic like that. It’s kind of perverse, but I'm against being too professional. When I wake up in bed and I record my dream, am I working? I don’t think there’s a way to answer that question. I can work from anywhere, everywhere.
IA: Can you tell me about your drawings?
JS: I started a series of drawings in 2017 on pink onion skin paper. You know when you make a carbon copy? There’s the pink slip and the yellow one. The drawings are all on the pink slips. I started making them while I was grieving the death of my father and I couldn't make anything. It was a meditative way to work that didn't feel like I had to think too much. I collect a lot of screenshots from movies, TV, videos, or blogs, and I would use a projector to trace the screenshots on individual sheets of that pink onion skin paper right on the wall. I know I could use a light-box or trace on a table, but I like tracing with a projector on the wall, partially because of how the drawing will pick up the wall’s texture. I worked on that for about a year. I have a series of 75 of those. I just started drawing again in 2020. I'm using much more color and mixing sources and printing, adding more collage elements with white out, crayons, and highlighter. Most of the material is still derived from screenshots.
IA: How do your drawings relate to your videos?
JS: I thought of the series I started in 2017 as a sequence. Like a pre-storyboard of some kind. With the new ones, I'm not sure yet. I still think of them as a way to storyboard. Drawing is a nice way for me to get to making the video: by combining different images with different text and seeing what works well, what feels good and what doesn't.
IA: Describe the porno you’d like to make.
JS: The ideal porn I’d make wouldn't represent any one identity or type of genital. So maybe it would be just an audio piece. An audio porno. I don't know what else it would be. I like the idea of shifting the point of view. I think the reason why I haven't made my porno yet is because of the issue of representation. I can't quite figure it out. When I watch porn, I like watching two other people so that my point of view is not implicated. In one of the audio pieces that I've been working on, it’s me singing a cover of a Judy Garland song. I've made a bunch of versions of it. And one of the versions I made was a porn version, where I'm masturbating until I cum while singing it.
It's a working idea, making audio masturbating pieces. When I say that out loud it sounds very creepy.
IA: Not to me.
Jordan Strafer, Pink Drawing 3 (Tension Graph), 2017. Graphite on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
Jordan Strafer, Pink Drawing 29 (Robert Frost), 2017. Graphite on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
Jordan Strafer, Pink Drawing 31 (Horror Film/Paranoid Film), 2017. Graphite on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
✸
Jordan Strafer is included in a three-person exhibition with Maryam Hoseini and Rindon Johnson, This End The Sun at New Museum, New York (June 30–October 3, 2021), and in a group exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin later this year. Strafer (b.1990, Miami, FL) is an artist working primarily in video, based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions at Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020-21); Housing, New York (2020); and SculptureCenter, New York (2020). In 2020-21 she presented a web-based project, No Bag, for Participant Inc’s online platform, Participant After Dark. Her first solo exhibition will be held at Participant Inc, New York in 2022.
Isis Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. She operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing service agency dedicated to artists.
Video still: Jordan Strafer, SOS, 2021
1 Dora (pseudonym) was a patient of Freud’s who he treated for eleven weeks in 1900 and diagnosed with hysteria. His notes of her treatment are a seminal psychoanalytic text, which served as a precursor to his exceedingly influential Interpretation of Dreams, published the same year. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_(case_study).
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Everyone Is Bad
Jordan Strafer Interviewed by Isis Awad
Video still: Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 2 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
Jordan Strafer is one of my best friends. I think of her (and annoy her) like a sibling. Below is a conversation with Jordan in her kitchen in Bushwick, where I finally got to ask her things I’ve always wanted to know.—Isis Awad
Isis Awad: Would you describe your work as autobiographical or journalistic?
Jordan Strafer: Definitely. Everything I make is autobiographical. The narratives in my work are derived from my life. Sometimes I think about the difference between memoir and autobiography and how truth is subjective and relative. There's an emotional truth to a story or a memory that isn’t objectively what happened.
IA: So a memoir to you has more wiggle-room for subjectivity, in terms of truth, versus an autobiography?
JS: I think so. I would describe my work as existing between both.
IA: Your work is personal, but you also don't really give any details.
JS: I give my Social Security number. It's in my artist's statement. You could steal it.
IA: PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure) was the last work I saw of yours in person. It was a two-channel video installation exhibited as part of In Practice: Total Disbelief (2020) at SculptureCenter, New York. Can you describe the work?
JS: PEP is a collage of events from my life and from the media that I've consumed. The script was initially about a teenager getting sent to a behavior modification camp. While I was writing it, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings was happening. She moved me and I worked it into the larger narrative. The script is a mix of sources including Blasey Ford’s testimony, Anita Hill's testimony from 1991, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) (which has always really interested me), the transcript from these psychological training tapes known as the Gloria Films (1965), and quotes from Sigmund Freud's Dora Case Study, when Freud described Dora’s dreams.1 Whenever I write scripts they include a variety of sources that I fit together to tell a story that tells a version of my story. I take quotes and collage them together. I often take out all the nouns and replace them, kind of like a Mad Lib. That's how I write my scripts.
Jordan Strafer, Contract death, 2020. Death certificate, inkjet print staple, pen on onionskin paper. 11 x 8.5 inches
Video still: Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 1 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
IA: What is PEP about?
JS: Some of the things it's about is truth and justice and the instability of victimhood or villainy, and how those two positions are interchangeable. One of my goals in that piece was to not have a victim. Although the female doll character is in a victim’s position, I didn't want her to be a victim. Maybe the better answer to the question of what it's about is that everyone is bad.
IA: Period. You often collaborate with and cast your friends in your videos. Do you prefer to work with people who you already know and are comfortable with?
JS: When I started making videos, I only cast myself. And then in graduate school, I began making videos with my dad and his husband. And part of my thinking for those choices was that I feel very sensitive about representing others and identities. It also has to do with the overarching idea that everyone is bad. So, if I'm showing evil in some form then I want to take responsibility for that depiction, and the only thing I can speak to is myself. I don’t want to implicate any specific identity or anyone else's representation in a position of wrongdoing.
IA: So you play all the evil parts?
JS: In a sense, yes. Partially, I’m very aware of looking as a potential form of violence, and I'm also just the most available. It was the same with casting my dad. I'm thinking about patriarchy. There's something really simple about literally casting my own father. When he died, I decided to cast friends as versions of him or myself using various forms of masks. After he died, the depiction of ‘father’ got more monstrous. To me, part of making the work is the energy during shooting and the psychodrama that ensues when you make your best friend make out with your boyfriend, or whatever. To me, that helps the energy of the piece. On another note, this is why I'm interested in masks and dolls as a way to not represent other people and to be as sensitive as I can be to how troubled figurative representation is, especially in film or photography.
IA: Before filming, do you give your cast a briefing of what the video is about? Or do you just hand them the script? How did you direct PEP?
JS: The way I direct is I envision different poses, like choreography, and the text always plays a huge part. I usually don't have the text, or script, spoken out by the actors. I make a shot list and choreographies to do over and over again and I have the actors pose like dolls or mannequins. I don't have a naturalistic way of directing. At least not at this point. The people in PEP were my boyfriend at the time, and my friends Zacry Spears and Carl Knight. To film the live action scenes, we took a trip upstate for a weekend and shot it. I had a storyboard that I drew out with reference images. I think everyone got the general idea of what we were filming and the feeling that I wanted, but even I didn't know what it would be about at the end. I was just in the middle of making it.
Part of what's nice about working with friends is I can ask them, “Can you act out this movement again, like this?” And then we try again. Like we're hanging out and making images together and I don't feel the pressure to explain what it's about, or I don't feel embarrassed to direct them, and I think that makes for better work. Then they have ideas and it becomes a collaborative process and it feels really comfortable. It’s also what my resources allow. If I had the resources to hire good actors, maybe I would. For PEP, I think it was much better to keep it interpersonal and hoping that through that, the result would evoke emotion, even though no one is actually a good actor.
IA: Can you tell me about the cake in PEP?
JS: PEP consists of two channels: a main channel and a companion channel. The cake, which appears in the companion channel, is kind of like a mood ring for the main channel. It's supposed to be a diorama of the murder scene, or attempted murder scene, taking place next to it. It was a fully edible red velvet cake made with frosting and candy, which I melted to make a red Jolly Rancher river. My friend and collaborator Chloe Cerabona was the genius behind the jolly rancher river. There were a lot of scenes where it was getting sliced and eaten that were never used in the final cut.
Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 1 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
Jordan Strafer, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019. Channel 2 of 2. Two-channel HD video, color, sound. 15:00 minutes
IA: I think that a level of humor really comes out in your work, which makes it all the more jarring because the subject matter feels dark, or like it’s coming from a dark place. Would you describe your work as camp? Or kitsch?
JS: I would happily embrace describing my work as camp. I think my work is also funny because it's really fake. Fake as in alienated or really artificial. Even the more horrific scenes in my videos feel really alienated and it is funny. I hope it's funny.
IA: I found it funny, and so emotional. Do you intentionally strive for your work to be accessible through emotion?
JS: I wouldn’t want to make something that isn’t emotional. I am most touched by art that makes me feel something. And since I’m working with my own emotions and life story, hopefully my work can act as a metaphor for other workings of the world. The ultra-specific can become universal code. Although I am by no means an expert, I am interested in psychoanalytic theory for this reason: everything operates symbolically. I enjoy thinking about things like the family unit, for example, as a stand-in for the way someone interacts with the rest of the world—whether or not it is literal, like father for patriarchy, gay father for double patriarchy.
IA: Whoever is watching can identify with what they’re watching in whatever way they want to. They see what they want to see, or they see what they feel. But do you want viewers to feel something specific?
JS: I just hope they feel something. That’s part of why I’m engaging with narratives of victimhood or wrongdoing, or the good and bad. I don’t really think there is a “right” side to choose in the story. Especially if it’s a story from my life, the last thing I want to do is make the character that represents me the innocent one.
IA: Even if you’re witnessing a murder, that's just what’s happening. It’s not necessarily good or bad.
JS: In PEP, for example, the two gay dads try to murder the teenager. You can see them as villains, but they're also the only characters that express any intimacy or love or have a private moment in the whole video. They share the most tender moment and they perpetuate the most violent moment. They're the only ones whose subjectivity is revealed at all; the only ones with live bodies, basically. The ‘victim’ cries at the hearing and tells a story that's actually very vague and nonspecific. She's made out of an altered fashion doll. She's sympathetic, but also not. She's blond and she comes from a privileged background. I try to move away from any kind of purity.
Jordan Strafer, WORKOUT, 2020. Inkjet print, ballpoint pen, tape on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
Jordan Strafer, The Continuum, 2020. Inkjet print, pen, marker, white out, post-its, glue on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
IA: Who are the artists, dead or alive, that you feel your work is inspired by or in line with?
JS: I think of art like other forms of scholarship. It builds upon itself and others. For me, the goal would be to make a contribution to that lineage. I don't know if it's up to me to say whether I'm in that lineage, but I think of artists like Ellen Cantor and Eleanor Antin and Lynn Hershman Leeson and other artists like Carol Rama, Lygia Clark. Especially Lygia Clark's relational objects. Obviously, Andrea Fraser. Lutz Bacher is one of my favorite artists.
Ellen Cantor I learned about for years working at Participant Inc. She had recently died when I started working there and Lia Gangitano, Participant’s founding director, had a lot of Ellen's personal belongings. One of the projects Lia had me work on was to archive Ellen’s things. Going through her stuff, I felt like I was getting to know her after she died. I felt very close to her looking through her personal notebooks and her computer and touching her clothes and her couch and then watching her work and going in her Vimeo account, looking at all her drawings. I felt an intimacy with her and to me, that's the best connection to have with an artist is to know them personally. I felt like I befriended a ghost. I think a lot of my favorite artists that really touched me have also died. Maybe I'm guilty of some kind of veneration like that. I am very romantic and idealistic about what art does or can do and I think that being an artist can be a really painful thing and it has destroyed a lot of people, or people have died too soon. That's what touches me the most.
IA: Would you want people to have access to you like that after you die?
JS: I hope that before I die, I throw it all out [laughs]. No, maybe I would keep my notebooks. I don’t think I would mind someone finding my notebooks. I just hope that I would make an impression on someone the way Ellen has on me. That to me would be success.
Jordan Strafer, White Pearle, 2020. Pencil, pen, sharpie, colored pencil, white out, post-it, inkjet print on onionskin paper. 11 x 8.5 inches
Jordan Strafer, Pink Drawing 3 (Tension Graph), 2017. Graphite on onionskin paper. 8.5 x 11 inches
IA: What do you consider to be the first artwork you made, that you would proudly call your first artwork?
JS: In high school, I was in a darkroom photography class. I really wanted to be in the advanced class but I never took the beginner class. And I asked my roommate in boarding school to show me all the stuff that you learn in the beginner class in the darkroom so I could lie and get into the advanced class. We went to the darkroom late one night and she showed me everything. I don't know why I wanted to do it so badly. And the project that I did in that class was I painted my friend's faces to look like old people with white paint and I drew on wrinkles and I had them pose with hamburgers. It's funny, I saw these photos recently when I was cleaning things out and it looks just like my work now. I was only 18 years old. I’d never made that connection. But to be really honest in answering your question, I still don’t feel like I’ve yet made that artwork that I can call a complete artwork that I am proud of. I just always feel like I have a lot more to do.
IA: How many hours per week do you work on your art?
JS: I guess when you have a practice like mine, everything you do is part of your work. Art can be so insidious and cannibalistic like that. It’s kind of perverse, but I'm against being too professional. When I wake up in bed and I record my dream, am I working? I don’t think there’s a way to answer that question. I can work from anywhere, everywhere.
IA: Can you tell me about your drawings?
JS: I started a series of drawings in 2017 on pink onion skin paper. You know when you make a carbon copy? There’s the pink slip and the yellow one. The drawings are all on the pink slips. I started making them while I was grieving the death of my father and I couldn't make anything. It was a meditative way to work that didn't feel like I had to think too much. I collect a lot of screenshots from movies, TV, videos, or blogs, and I would use a projector to trace the screenshots on individual sheets of that pink onion skin paper right on the wall. I know I could use a light-box or trace on a table, but I like tracing with a projector on the wall, partially because of how the drawing will pick up the wall’s texture. I worked on that for about a year. I have a series of 75 of those. I just started drawing again in 2020. I'm using much more color and mixing sources and printing, adding more collage elements with white out, crayons, and highlighter. Most of the material is still derived from screenshots.
IA: How do your drawings relate to your videos?
JS: I thought of the series I started in 2017 as a sequence. Like a pre-storyboard of some kind. With the new ones, I'm not sure yet. I still think of them as a way to storyboard. Drawing is a nice way for me to get to making the video: by combining different images with different text and seeing what works well, what feels good and what doesn't.
IA: Describe the porno you’d like to make.
JS: The ideal porn I’d make wouldn't represent any one identity or type of genital. So maybe it would be just an audio piece. An audio porno. I don't know what else it would be. I like the idea of shifting the point of view. I think the reason why I haven't made my porno yet is because of the issue of representation. I can't quite figure it out. When I watch porn, I like watching two other people so that my point of view is not implicated. In one of the audio pieces that I've been working on, it’s me singing a cover of a Judy Garland song. I've made a bunch of versions of it. And one of the versions I made was a porn version, where I'm masturbating until I cum while singing it.
It's a working idea, making audio masturbating pieces. When I say that out loud it sounds very creepy.
IA: Not to me.
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Video still: Jordan Strafer, SOS, 2021
Jordan Strafer is included in a three-person exhibition with Maryam Hoseini and Rindon Johnson, This End The Sun at New Museum, New York (June 30–October 3, 2021), and in a group exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin later this year. Strafer (b.1990, Miami, FL) is an artist working primarily in video, based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions at Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020-21); Housing, New York (2020); and SculptureCenter, New York (2020). In 2020-21 she presented a web-based project, No Bag, for Participant Inc’s online platform, Participant After Dark. Her first solo exhibition will be held at Participant Inc, New York in 2022.
Isis Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. She operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing service agency dedicated to artists.
1 Dora (pseudonym) was a patient of Freud’s who he treated for eleven weeks in 1900 and diagnosed with hysteria. His notes of her treatment are a seminal psychoanalytic text, which served as a precursor to his exceedingly influential Interpretation of Dreams, published the same year. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_(case_study).
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