Shelley Jordan is a Portland, Oregon-based painter and moving-image artist who explores interior and exterior worlds and connections between past and present experiences. She uses traditional drawing and painting media applied to two-dimensional artwork, animation and installation to express the complex nature of memory; physical and emotional, collective and personal. Her recent paintings are inspired by found leaves in states of decay that leave traces that mark the passage of time and map the cycle of life. Small-scale watercolors allow for close observation and record the nuance and particularity of each specimen while large-scale, experimental paintings explore encounters between disparate media that resist and resolve to create topographical surfaces that evoke tide pools, dried-up riverbeds and aerial and microscopic views. Selected solo exhibitions include; The Ildiko Butler Gallery, Fordham University, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Whitebox Galleryand the Frye Museum. Her work has been exhibited at the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, The Torrance Art Museum and venues in Italy, Spain, Israel, Great Britain, Australia and Germany. Her projects have been supported by the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Center for the Humanities, OSU, a Jerusalem International Fellowship, two Oregon Arts Commission Individual Fellowship Awards, a Fulbright-Hayes Group Travel Research Grant and artist residencies at the American Academy in Rome, at Montalvo, Djerassi. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College, a BFA from The School of Visual and is a Professor of Art at Oregon State University.
Shelley Jordon
