In his latest body of work, Christopher Paul Jordan reexamines his religious upbringing through a series of semi-autobiographical paintings which have been peeled away from their original surfaces. “A thief in the night” is a biblical phrase that promises the sudden arrival of the rapture, in which the righteous are taken to heaven while the wicked are left to suffer judgements and plagues. As the queer son of a Pentecostal pastor, Jordan grew up with the fear that he would be left behind during the rapture. Now as an adult estranged from his parents, Jordan reexamines these fears to make sense of life in the wake of sudden loss. Relating the fear and anxiety of his childhood to questions of displacement at large, A Thief in the Night brings attention to the conditions of removal, loss, and remembrance brought on by forced relocation, communal division, and social exile.

 Beginning as a muralist in Tacoma, Washington, Jordan saw first-hand the restorative power of public art to mend divisions, cultivate dialogue, and open space for historically marginalized communities to coexist. As forced migration swept through his hometown, Jordan witnessed many of these murals lost, painted over, and removed. In search of a way to both conserve the concept of muralism and embody the experience of being uprooted, Jordan turned to his current process of painting on window screens and mesh-wire. First applying expressive swaths of acrylic to a ground, Jordan adapts a removal technique historically used for conservation to physically peel the paintings onto wire-mesh screens. What results are two surfaces with shared histories, each embedded with the remnants, erasures, and auras left by the act of removal and preservation. The memories, traditions and likenesses generated by displacement continue to inhabit both spaces.

With each acrylic mesh transfer, Jordan reckons with a personal type of dislocation: A soul sold through the middle passage, a child cut off from their own cultural inheritance, a spiritual text that’s been drained of its meaning. Unpredictability is a constant in every act of transference, and each tendered screen complicates prevailing assumptions about what it means to preserve: Can any living, breathing work of art be removed from its original context without losing something essential? In Jordan’s practice, pressing two grounds together to yield an inverted plane of pigments is not simple transposition: trauma, uncertainty, and the experience of loss are all bound up in each act of “peeling”. The studio becomes a threshing-floor, and Jordan the steward of the “histories, omens, and secrets” passing through his wire-mesh screens.

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