JORDAN STRAFER — DECADENCE AT THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY

Jordan Strafer (b. 1990, Miami) is an artist based in New York whose primary medium is video. Her practice revolves around stories of herself and her family, while also relating obliquely to questions of racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and “Americanism”. Situations that often seem absurd redirect the focus from the plot to our own way of seeing and—through their clearly staged and alienated form—allow a critical stance towards a society defined by questionable moral ideas.

LOOPHOLE (2023) and DECADENCE (2024) are the first two chapters of a planned film trilogy set against the backdrop of a fictionalized high-profile rape trial in 1990s-era Florida. LOOPHOLE, the first chapter, focuses on the speculative romantic affair between the lead defense attorney and a juror during the trial. DECADENCE, the second chapter commissioned specifically for the exhibition, is elliptical as it incorporates events from the night of the alleged rape, and the celebration after the acquittal. Referencing the genre of erotic thrillers and televised court cases popular at the time, both videos pull from film scripts, local news coverage, reality TV, and publicly sourced courtroom documents, and are influenced in part by the artist’s mother’s role in the legal defense team in another notorious rape trial that took place in 1991.

A photo of Strafer’s mother, which appeared in Newsweek coverage of the trial, has a recurring appearance in the exhibition. Her face is frozen on the screen in the sculptural installation Channel 2, a miniature TV set installed in one of the Renaissance Society’s alcoves modeled after the early 1990’s Oprah Winfrey set. She returns in a series of drawings Strafer created with everyday office materials and encased in fused glass, which are hung in display cases on three levels of the building.

Curated by Myriam Ben Salah