CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/3/2020

In 'Jordan Casteel: Within Reach,' fundamental and expansive humanity

"Miles and Jojo" (2014) is reproduced from Jordan Casteel: Within Reach, published to accompany the exhibition currently on hiatus at the New Museum. "There is power in the gaze," Dawould Bey writes. "Throughout history, black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong—usually white—person; such an assertion of empowered exchange was an extreme violation of the enforced social contract that was meant to keep black people 'in their place.' Jordan is aware of this, and in her paintings, the subject and viewer share a reciprocal gaze, creating a momentary exchange that potentially extends from the object out into the larger social world, with all the capacities for transformed social relations implied by that gesture. Ultimately, Jordan's paintings create a space in which we see can acknowledge each other, in which black people are able to see themselves mirrored in her ambitious material reimaginings. In the fraught times we are living through, this ability to calmly look each other in the eye and recognize a fundamental and expansive humanity staring back may be what we need more than anything."