Jordan Nassar: Surge

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Jordan Nassar: SURGE on view at 4859 Fountain Avenue from May 18 through July 20. This is his fourth exhibition with the gallery and debuts new mosaic tile works alongside large multi-paneled landscape embroideries. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 18 from 3-6 pm.

Considering heritage and homeland, Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar explores landscape in a variety of forms rooted in traditional Levantine crafts. Most known for his tatreez embroidery, SURGE features a suite of new experiments with glass tile mosaics. His first-ever artwork crafted from traditional glass tiles was a commission for the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu, HI in 2022.Nassar’s mosaics are a material expression of his interest in excavation and personal archaeology. Broadly inspired by Byzantine tilework and architectural decoration, the ornate composition for Al-Atlal (The Ruins) is an ode to a mosaic floor (5th-7th century AD) uncovered by chance in 2022 by a Palestinian farmer in his olive grove in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. Wondering if this treasure of history has survived the Israeli bombardment of the past months, Nassar’s remaking is a gesture of remembrance. Echoing the animal motifs and border embellishments from this excavated antiquity, Nassar’s work depicts birds and lions whose forms come directly from Palestinian embroideries. Wrapping around the edges, Nassar incorporates lyrics to songs sung by revered Arab musician Umm Kulthum, drawing a relationship between text and landscape as a type of syntax.

Nassar’s meticulously hand stitched landscapes are carefully mapped-out patterns juxtaposing regional motifs of flowers and stars with imagined landscapes in a way that breaks with and expands upon the thousands of years old tradition. Treating craft within its capacity as a communicative form, he examines conflicting issues of identity and cultural participation using geometric patterning. Adaptive and evolving, his works are rooted in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony. Nassar continues to push against the inherent gridded structure of his embroidery cloth. Though he shifts the colors between multiple panels that comprise a single work—from tangerine to rust to goldenrod—he allows the wandering line of a hillside or mountain range to continue.

The exhibition title is taken from a collection of poetic writing called Surge by Etel Adnan. Her text contains tender and radical aphorisms for an unknown future, such as “Reality is messianic/ apocalyptic/ my soul is terror;” and “we have a few certitudes to lay our shoulders on, and still we go on opening the shutters, welcoming friends… in cities left-over by wars.” The idea of ‘a surge’ speaks to a rush of emotions, changes in political consciousness, or the swelling of the sea. Nassar’s dreamed landscapes collapse distance, casting the gaze toward imagined horizons.