Decadence

WWII veteran, Ray, is a self-help guru in the afterlife, guiding us though breathing exercises and spiritual release. A former Nazi air force headquarters turned 90s daytime talk-show studio becomes the unlikely setting for collective healing of deep personal trauma. Complicated symbols and histories mix into a singular filmic experience.

Appropriating the aesthetics of 1990s legal thrillers and NC-17 potboilers, Jordan Strafer’s film serves up a dark, parafictional take on the courtroom drama, in which semi-fictionalized proceedings surrounding an actual sexual assault case mutate into a Grand Guignol of Americanness and white privilege. With its mise-en-scène of beige interiors and desaturated fashions, LOOPHOLE braids the theatrical with the procedural amid a hazy atmosphere of systemic corruption, media voyeurism, and entrenched power.

SOS (2021) was presented as part of “This End the Sun,” on view at the New Museum from June 30–October 3, 2021. Strafer’s SOS (2021) interweaves fantastical scenes with the artist’s autobiography to address themes of human cruelty, power, and futility. The work cycles through scenes of night and day, with dolls as protagonists: a girl seemingly stranded on a snowy beach, an elderly man on a medical stretcher, and two EMTs who attend to him. Strafer employs strategies of doubling, interchangeability, and scale shifts, with large hands occasionally swooping down to animate, caress, and bathe the dolls—perhaps in acts of care and/or control. (New Museum)

Talk Show is the final film in Jordan Strafer’s Loophole trilogy. The narrative unfolds across two periods of time: the turn of the millennium, shot in color, and the afterlife, shot in black and white. Structured around a talk show, the work examines 1990s celebrity culture, violence against women, and justice as televised spectacle. Its screenplay draws on sources ranging from news footage to self-help media, blending historical fact with fiction. [Overview courtesy of The Whitney]

Jordan Strafer's PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure) was exhibited at SculptureCenter as part of In Practice: Total Disbelief (2020). Strafer’s PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure) is, among other things, a video about betrayal, the public nature of victimhood, and behavioral conditioning. Its narrative spreads across at least two related timelines. In the present, the video opens onto a witness testimony at a public hearing acted out by a plastic doll in glamorous closeups. Meanwhile, sequences shot to give a handheld, first-person perspective read as composed flashbacks of events described in the hearing. Notably, these sequences include the speaker’s compulsory attendance at a makeshift behavioral bootcamp in the woods at the behest of her two fathers, who later appear as villains in realistic rubber masks. (SculptureCenter)

This new video work is based on a true story of kinship and betrayal aboard a transatlantic air ambulance from London to Miami. Including life-size dolls and starring live actors (in order of appearance) Marti Wilkerson, Jim Fletcher, Alexandro Segade, and Cammisa Buerhaus, the video is a psychological thriller that takes place in flight—while time moves glacially, reality becomes suspended

In No Spank, a remote Greek island that doubles as a starched and highly regimented girls’ school serves as the setting of Jordan Strafer’s mordant and ribald coming-of-age story, in which the artist’s trademark mise-en-scène, flair for period minutiae, and tensely taciturn performances evoke the grim frustrations, petty rebellions, and light body horror of adolescence.