Jordan Sullivan, Artist In Focus: Drawing Beyond Boundaries In "In A Country Without A Name"

IN A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME" BY JORDAN SULLIVAN

Delve Into His Art Practice And Thoughts While Gaining Insights Into His Current Project.

Immerse Yourself In A Visual Narrative That Transcends Boundaries, Discovering Where To Witness Sullivan's Captivating Works.

The Artist Jordan Sullivan hailing from Houston, Texas, Jordan Sullivan spent his formative years navigating the landscapes of rural Ohio and suburban Detroit.

"IN A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME" BY JORDAN SULLIVAN

‍Transitioning from a variety of odd jobs in Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles, Sullivan eventually embraced a full-time career as an artist. Currently, he resides in the vibrant borough of Queens, New York, shaping his artistic journey against the dynamic backdrop of the city.

‍My work depicts the struggles and daily lives of people no longer living but surviving under a depraved ruling class. In 2018 I got sober after a couple long and painful decades of drug and alcohol abuse.

Around this time, I began to realize that we were living in a future that had already happened, and that we are most likely doomed to repeat the 20th century for the rest of our existence (I’m a slow learner).

Coming down from twenty years of bad drugs and bad relationships, my brain was in ruins, and with what was left of it (not much), I began to imagine what a picture of America’s capitalist system might look like.

What does time look like when it is collapsed and collaged?

After all, time doesn’t disappear, it accumulates, falls on us like dirt into a grave. People form the soul of my work. I draw a lot from photographs I take walking up and down Fresh Pond Road and Myrtle Avenue in my neighborhood in Queens, NY.

Fresh Pond is a long, well-lit street, while Myrtle Avenue is a long and very dark street - always in shadow because of the tracks of the above ground trains that move overhead.

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The bars on Myrtle are extra dark too, even in the daytime, and I lost a lot of life hiding in those bars.

My time is mostly spent on the sidewalks now.

I think a lot of us walking those sidewalks, under the low moan of the train, live our lives in the shadow of a system that hates us.

I love the people I encounter on the street, and I try as best I can to present a spectrum of their actions and emotions - love, rebellion, revulsion, joy, disillusion, confusion, corruption, detachment, derangement, stress, fear, anguish, and hopefully a sustained resilience.

There’s lots of drunkenness, buffoonery, and a kind of shiftlessness happening throughout the work too.

Broad questions keep coming up. I see them in the faces I draw.

They ask, What now?

Where now? When? How?

I also use imagery from films, advertisements, and social media. I’m not creating a world, I am scavenging through this one.

‍Sometimes I feel like I’m capturing some sort of vital reality, other times I feel foolish, and I think making art is a real waste of time, but I love it too much to really believe that for too long.

‍Materially, the drawings are made with colored pencils on salvaged papers.

The paper I draw on is torn from old books and that’s important to the subject matter I work with because, like this paper that has been torn from the narrative it was a part of, so have the people in my pictures - they’ve been decontextualized, pushed to the margins socially and economically, left to question how much of their lives still belong to them.

‍Salvaging has always been a thing in my art - giving discarded or old material a new life. It comes into play elsewhere in my life too.

I work as a substance use disorder counselor for teenagers at a residential rehab facility.

Many of the kids I work with have been through so much - abuse, neglect, abandonment, violence associated with police and gang affiliations.

‍The system has failed them, just as it’s failed most everyone who is not in a position of power, but I hardly blame people, I blame capitalism. Many of the kids I work with don’t feel safe and never have.

‍If there is one thing that should be guaranteed to children, it is their safety.

‍I’m thinking about the current genocide in Gaza, the surviving children there, and how unforgivable it is that the people in power will not save them.

The murder of the people of Gaza is as bad as anything that has ever happened within our history.

As humans we will be remembered for our violence. Violence is our legacy. It’s worse than it seems.

The days begin at night | Colored Pencil and Graphite on found paper | Contemporary Drawing by Jordan Sullivan

‍The global capitalist empire is working exactly how the imperialists want it to. America has always worked this way, forcing us to watch, if not making us direct and indirect victims and perpetrators of the violence.

Those in power are deliberately doing nothing to stop the genocide in Gaza. Instead, they are saying, “Look what we can do, look who we can kill, and you have to watch, hopelessly.”

I’m thinking of these lyrics from the Joy Division song Atrocity Exhibition:

‍You'll See The Horrors Of A Faraway Place Meet The Architects Of Law Face To Face See Mass Murder On A Scale You've Never Seen

‍At this moment in history, I wonder if we can even call ourselves human anymore.

‍Have we evolved into something else, something far more deranged and monstrous, something beyond the evil we have defined?

Does our species need a new name, too?  

The world seems better off without us. I wish I didn’t believe that, but most of the time I do. How much more violence can we possibly inflict?‍

‍I believe art is at least a small form of resistance, but despite our resistance, and all the good social demonstrations and protests over the past decade a revolution is still missing.

If you spend any part of your life fighting for the oppressed, exploited, and marginalized, then that’s something.

I try not to be hopeless, but the world is ending, it just depends on whether you have felt the apocalypse yet.

‍Even if a massive global uprising were to happen and a good progressive leftist system was put in place, and people found some freedom and economic equality, the climate crisis is irreversible and civilization has limited time, but that time isn’t worthless, and what happens within it matters, even if it adds up to nothing. Hope is still important - in this world and the next.

Text by Jordan Sullivan

MORE ABOUT JORDAN SULLIVAN:

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For a deeper dive into Jordan Sullivan's Artistic Realm, Follow His Instagram account for insights into upcoming projects and exhibitions.

Explore his painting practice, writings, books, and films on his Website.

Jordan Sullivan

Jordan Sullivan0

Additionally, check out his publishing company, Amygdala Publishing, on Instagram or their website for noteworthy creations.