JORDAN DONER

 

Jordan Doner is a New York based conceptual artist and photographer, whose highly finished work offers formal resolutions to the tension between consumerism, transcendence, revolution, and utopia.

 

Since 2009 Doner has been blowing up luxury goods and staging architectural, per-formative, participatory Utopias.

 

For the A Revolution In Luxury series, Doner detonated Murakami and Richard Prince edition Louis Vuitton handbags.  Doner both photographs the explosion and collects the debris, which he reconstitutes into consumable photography and sculpture.  These ostensible violent revolutionary gestures, frozen photographically in mid-trajectory, often smokeless and without a motion blur, assume a compositional formalism.

 

Donor’s Utopias, composed of back-lit military-parachutes and infinity mirror-rooms, recall 60s utopianism and 60s sci-fi, as well as the glossy retail spaces and campaign-sets used to market global luxury brands. The photographic record of these spaces are termed Landscapes, or Lifestyles - when the Utopias are inhabited by puckish idealized beauties.  The printed image is often enshrined in the same parachute fabric, nylon, and Plexiglas that comprise the Staged Utopia.

 

In 2013, Doner began the series Artifacts, assembling sculptural work from components of Staged Utopias.  Plexiglas and the nylon stocking materials used in the sheer, tailored, designer bodysuits worn by the puckish inhabitants of the staged utopias, are arranged in picture frames.  The result produces a synthetic metaphisciality of glowing light, and reflectionless mirrors where one cannot see one’s self.  The simple nature of Artifacts, and the use of mid-century “space-age” materials, recalls the serialized constructions of Minimalism and at moments, the color-palate of Pop.

 

Doner’s photographs, mixed media conceptual works and industrial designs have been exhibited at the MoMA’s PS1 Museum are included in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, among others. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, The Huffington Post, and The Miami Herald Art Basel Edition to name a few.

 

His commercial fashion photography has been featured in or on the covers of international Vogues, Harper’s Bazaars, Interview, Wallpaper, V, Visionaire, GQ, and Jalouse to name a few.

 

Doner graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, studied photography at the Manhattan’s International Center of Photography and later - digital media at Parsons School of Design in New York and film and video production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.