My first encounter with Jordan Eagles’ work came a year and a half ago in his multimedia installation “Projection.” The rooms were bathed in undulating red light from overhead slides depicting blood in various formations. A less immersive experience of his work is on display now in his first solo show with Krause Gallery. The wall-hanging works in BARC: Blood, Acrylic, Resin, Copper continue the artist’s eight-year obsession with preserving animal blood in a sort of suspended animation.
Through an exacting “self-invented process,” Eagles combines cow blood—collected from local slaughterhouses—with copper and resin under Plexiglas. Protected from decay, the blood becomes a unifying symbol of life, and takes on the visual aspect of paint, creating a range of effects. In “TSBC4,” layers of blood and copper explode outwards in a radiating plume that brings to mind Persian rugs as much as Jackson Pollock.
“TSBC4,” by Jordan Eagles.
In some pieces, the blood is in distinct layers, running the gamut of colors and texture. “Life Force,” a large work with dark forms under a bright filter of blood red, could pass as a nightmarish landscape, and it holds onto the mysterious nature of blood. Conversely, dried blood in “URTS” bears the arid cracks of a Renaissance oil painting. It is in this nexus of science, art history and childlike wonder that Eagles tries to establish his work, with mixed results.
The basement of the small Lower East Side gallery houses three works, and the subject matter adds a degree of weirdness, descending into a basement to walls of blood. It is the most distinct feeling elicited in BARC, and a far cry from the splotched and sickly bodies of his “Hemosapien” project. Using blood as a medium has become ho-hum in the wake of Hermann Nitsch and Andres Serrano, and it’s only through experimentation with the genre that Eagles finds originality.
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Through May 1. Krause Gallery, 149 Orchard St., 212-777-7799.
