As the Wetlands Take Grounds: Jordan Deal
(aka ROSEKILLJUPITER)

Runs / April 7 – April 29, 2023

Reception / First Friday, April 7, 6–10 PM
Gallery Hours / Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present As the wetlands take grounds, a multi-media installation by Philadelphia-based artist Jordan Deal, aka ROSEKILLJUPITER. For this installation Deal uses materials such as found objects and wood, used clothing, casts from body parts, feathers, video and audio, and other items that they have collected and constructed over time as part of their ongoing investigative practice. In As the wetlands take grounds, Deal’s cobbled together structure looms large, filling the space and inviting viewers to look closely, move around carefully, and enter the artist's ever-expanding mythology.

In this ghostly installation Deal uses performance, sound, and image as a conduit between unseen forces and the materializations of socio-political structures. Exploring epistemologies of blackness, ritual, spiritual slickness, and (de)construction, Deal physically mashes objects together to make unfamiliar juxtapositions suggesting that it is possible to reinvent belief systems and recreate structural relationships. An entry point into the undercurrents and worlds that ride through the cracks of the streets, swamps, and seas of our political landscape, in As the wetlands take grounds, Deal combines sculptural waste in unexpected ways, thus exposing secrets and passageways that shape our surroundings and ultimately, us.

Artist Bio 

Jordan Deal, aka ROSEKILLJUPITER, is a Philadelphia based multidisciplinary practitioner and alchemist. They have been investigating the use of storytelling as the accumulation of urban myth building, multisensorial/fragmented experiences, memory, and the use of vocal and movement-based improvisation as a generative and investigative tool that harnesses and disperses CHAOS as a subversive material. Through using the interflux of collected sound field recordings, video/film documenta, and real-time mythological fabrication, Deal explores dialectics, borders and territories; blackness as creative destruction; the tropes of superhero/villain; undead knowledge; and counter-active channels of potentiality that exist outside of global colonialism and imperialism’s frameworks and mappings. Deal asks how urban mythology, memory, storytelling, language, and the way we place ourselves in space disrupts, redistributes, and questions self-agency, power, violence, and authority relative to our local geographies.

Deal has shown work with Protocinema & Protodispatch (2022 & 2023), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (PHL), Brick Theater (NYC), Vox Populi (PHL), Fleisher Art Memorial (PHL), Bartram’s Gardens (PHL), & No Tomorrow underground (ATL) among others. This past fall, Deal was selected as a Fall 2022 research fellow at Amant Foundation in Brooklyn, New York, where they continued their investigations of chaos force. They have been included in published prints such as the Titled House Review Spring 2021 issue and Grizzly Grizzly: In Dialogue.