Blue Spruce

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)

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)