Into the Æther with Jordan Scott Gaunce

Jordan Scott Gaunce
Into the Æther
Duane Reed Gallery
St. Louis, MI
until March 29th, 2025

Look, you know I don't get around to things, art things until they are as good as over. There may be a very good reason for that. There might not be. Maybe I don't want to share... You know, that thing! For just a few more days, Jordan Scott Gaunce’s Into the Æther, an interrogation of perception, of sense and spirituality, ours, his, a connection to consciousness, the subtle vibrancy of his call to the synesthesia of colour, will continue to adorn the walls of St. Louis’ Duane Reed Gallery. 

The work explicitly addresses the unseen forces that impact our existence. Each canvas is unambiguously detailed. It’s more than geometrically exacting, although the work is informed by the significance of geometry. It exudes and extrudes beyond the constraints of paint and canvas asking the participant to provide their own interference fringes, in some respects I suppose as the kinetic artists did. This is a body of work of discovery and of feels. It feels compellingly postmodern but why oh why do I find something quite essentially disarmingly-charmingly steampunk modernist about it too? What is it, in the telling?

I’m embedding Jordan's conversation with fellow artist Alicia LaChance, recorded at the gallery shortly after the opening of his show. It’s difficult not to love the can’t sit still passion of the artist as he and Alicia engage the audience and take them on a wonderful journey around the gallery walls. And humour!  

Raised in New Mexico, Jordan moved to California but has been based in Missouri for quite some time. Like so many, his artistic impulse re-emerged during and after the pandemic. Crawling from the wreckage of all that was lost has been a titanic confrontation between progressives glimpsing permanent change and new school capitalist exploiters so keen to return to the status quo. (I think the winning side are the ones not dominating the media headlines each day.) 

When I exchanged emails with Jordan he asked what I was reading, his work has antecedents in science and neuroscience and maybe he wanted to know where I was at. I'm not there… Charlie Porter’s-Novia Scotia House, Sebastian Groes-Right In My Head, Constance Debré, Love Me Tender-fine french autofiction, actually all books from people confronted by imposed limitations and each resolutely defiant of every expectation except their own. All never done with the new because they can’t be. The past is a ghost. The past a geometrical constraint designed with inescapable edges. And the new refuses to be ignored.  There is in the end a very painterly lust for life in this work. The future is liminal. The future is a voice, insidious, insistent and quiet here, beckoning us Into the Æther.