The Butcher Shop

JORDAN SEGAL

SEPTEMBER 10 - September 19
press release

Welcome to the “The Butcher Shop”! The curatorial team at AlterWork Studios is proud and excited to present Jordan Segal’s first solo show, both digitally and physically. This new body of work builds off of older ideas of the artist, but is specifically focused on exploring ways of representing disease and flesh. Ironically, COVID-19 has made these ideas and work more relevant than ever. This collection is the culmination of five months of the artist focusing on how material and texture come together to reflect his feelings about the current pandemic. The small sculptures were created in the artist’s aunt’s old, musty basement upstate during the quarantine, while the wall pieces have been in the works for over two years, before the notion of a pandemic. The wall pieces were finished in the artist’s room in NYC, with the scent of illness swelling around him.

The work is primarily made out of recycled materials — glass bottles, seltzer cans, packaging cardboard, cereal boxes and gloves, all of which have been broken, torn, burned, crushed, impaled, and/or wrapped in gauze. The material has then been reassembled into fleshy, creature-like objects.  All of the pieces are wrapped in a weblike material as if hunks of flesh have been lying around, finally found by some lone wanderer in a dystopia.

“My ambition as an artist is to create work that truly and honestly captures the haunting reality of these unfortunate times.” ~ Jordan Segal