art

come one, come all to my upcoming photo exhibit!  hope to see you there.

about aligned – artist statement

aligned is an exhibition about wrestling with the comfort of order.

human life is a struggle to impose order on a world that is naturally disorderly. we strive for routines, goals, and milestones to mark the passage of time and gauge our success. we search for serendipities, hidden meaning, structure, fate to assist us through life’s challenges.

we seek the ultimate goal – to be happy – by reducing it to understandable lines. we use our lines to make our imprint on the world.

but aspiring for control limits the potential for our growth. too often, we get caught in the what-ifs and the if-onlys and the somedays. we spend so much time planning that it might never seem like time to just do.

aligned explores the desire to be in control.

the orderliness in the images is so seductive that we can often focus exclusively on the need for lines, not what’s within – and outside - them.

what’s more beautiful: control or its subject?
can we be out of control, but in control too?
how can we let go?

artist bio

i’m drawn to journalistic photography and depictions of real life. to me, a photo is as interesting for its commentary on how we see as it is on what we see; the mind of the photographer is inseparable from the art itself.

i use my photographic experience of reality as a tool for self-reflection. I bring honesty and openness to my work, preferring to be active in creating an image as opposed to passively observing. as a photographer, i’m attentive to detail, seduced by order, gregarious, and simultaneously self-conscious; my images are a mirror onto my inner world.

i’m jordan bower.

aligned is on display at 889 yonge yoga studio in toronto, canada, from october 24.
opening party: thursday, november 8 @ 8 pm.

a city becomes liveable based upon a network of interconnected public spaces that most never stop to consider unless something has gone horribly right or terrifically wrong. public spaces are like the typography of urban life in that they dictate the way we communicate, interact, meet, and relate to the place where we live while remaining almost entirely invisible.

sometimes it takes an event like nuit blanche, which drew several hundred thousand people out onto the streets of toronto this past saturday night, to open our eyes to the impact of public space and, quite simply, how great our city could be. for twelve hours, torontonians roamed the city, ostensibly to interact with contemporary art but really just to look at everyone else and try to figure out what ‘interacting with contemporary art’ really means to our neighbours. streets were packed with pedestrians, cafes and restaurants were kept open, bars served drinks until 4 am. it was so positively un-toronto that i had to wonder aloud where in the world i was when i found myself in the parking lot of a west queen west car wash dancing to electro-pop blasted out of a set of speakers perched on the back of a pick-up truck, at 5 o’clock in the morning, with approving police officers looking on.

ok, so the art was difficult to connect with (to say the least), but that’s not the point. torontonians visited new parts of their city, learned that they could actually start up conversation with someone else on the street without worrying about being rudely snubbed, and got to play metaphysical tourist in their city. at 6 in the morning, i found myself at a nearly abandoned soccer stadium, watching 20-odd people jumping on an enormous inflatable locust, and the normalcy of this activity really took me aback. across the street, in an enormous warehouse, two members of a band sat on a stage, guitars in hand, droning out atmospheric, eerie music to a crowd that couldn’t have numbered more than 30. to me, the artistic message behind nuit blanche wasn’t that art is art, but that we are art, and the way that we interact with art is art. blaring dance music out of pickup truck isn’t art, but a group of people dancing on a sidewalk is exciting and expressive and fundamentally important for us to imagine what our city is and could be.

there is a functional message here too, and chris hume at the star lays out the beginning of the conversation. you may be a commuter or a driver, but at the end of the day we are all pedestrians, and our city should be laid out from a pedestrian’s pespective first. at 1 am saturday, i was amused to be honked at by a driver who felt as if my jaywalking was preventing him from gaining an extra 20 meters of real estate on his drive home. we live in a city where pedestrians are consistently warned to ‘obey our signals’, and where drivers feel empowered to give pedestrians, bicyclists, and skateboarders the finger if they interfere with their right of way. if you haven’t used toronto’s poorly laid out bike routes, you have no idea how inconvenient - and dangerous - it is when a driver decides that he will pull over to the side of the road, forcing the cyclist to veer into traffic, to say nothing of the poor state of repair of those bike routes (or how dangerous riding on them can actually be). as downtown toronto succumbs to the pressure of condoization, it is faced with the uncomfortable responsibility of city planning, something it has failed miserably at time and again.

when the city woke up from its nuit blanche hangover, hopefully it gained a new perspective on the spectacular things that a pedestrian friendly city can offer. for a monthly reminder, swing by pedestrain sundays in kensington on the last sunday of every month and watch how your neighbours sing, dance, play, laugh, and - gasp - transact business! in a car-free world. and hopefully we opened our eyes to the potential of a consistent car-free zone; the fact that cars are allowed in yorkville, or kensington, or queen between john and spadina on a weekend is an anachronistic reminder of a car-dominated time that, with any luck, our society is outgrowing. if you’re interested in more information about this type of thing, sign up for an email from streets are for people, the community group responsible for the green car outside la pallette in kensington.

it’s time to change our font. our city can be great. talk about that with the person you’re sitting beside on the streetcar on the way home. just don’t tell him about the giant locust, unless you want him to think you’re really crazy.

my india trip ended somewhat abruptly: i had been debating whether to attend my cousin’s wedding and spent several days agonizing over the decision. one day, i woke up and decided it was time to come home; i called my mom and shared the news, which almost instantly allowed the rest of my family to colour me back into a wedding from which i had been unceremoniously crossed out. regret started at about the instant that i hung up the phone; my timing is always just a bit too late on things.

the transition was lightning quick. one day i was in a peaceful village in the foothills of the himalaya. the next i was in a hotel room the size of a shoebox in 42 degree delhi, with one more day to an arrival in the dubai airport shopping extravaganza. then london. then toronto. it all hit before i could even take a second to think.

i’m more than three months removed from that 72 hours of culture shock, but i’m still looking for an appropriate way to close my trip. what’s left for me - besides the memories, which is a cliche that i’ve learned lasts only about three months - is about 14,000 photos, 14,000 stories and memories and people and places.

so photo management has become my way of trying to dissect and understand the depth of the experience that i had in india. i’ve been able to stretch this self-exploration into several full-fledged projects, although at this point the only completed project that i began was a plan to decorate an overwhelmingly white wall in my overwhelmingly white room. that success, and the positive feedback i’ve received from everyone who interacts with my work, has encouraged me to dream a little bit bigger.

toronto is well known for its collection of art galleries; the contact toronto photography festival, which takes place each may, is the largest photography event in north america. accordingly, i’m working on organizing a subset of my images into a coherent theme in order to shop them around and get some gallery space. i’m (necessarily) pushing myself to think outside the scope of something organized along the lines of “these are my best photos”, despite how much that type of theme might speak to me.

this is turning out to be a difficult process of self-examination. what was i thinking when i took this photo?, i find myself asking. what was the theme in this week in january versus this one in april? what kind of music was i listening to? what do these images say about the places that i was seeing? more importantly, what do these images say about me and the experience that i went through?

this line of questioning only raises deeper and more significant answers about me, who i am, what i represent, what i dream about. but it’s difficult to confront coupling these private thoughts with a very public exposition. i’m caught asking how much of myself i want to share. of course, the real answer is all, but that ignores the follow-up question: how much are others truly interested to receive?

so what would you do? do you stay true to yourself and put out the show that you want? or would you restrict your interpretation of your art to something basic, something like “this is how people in india live”. the latter seems like a grade 4 science experiment.

(and if you needlessly point out that i’m asking these very personal questions in the [first entry] on a very public medium, perhaps you’ll realize that the question has already been answered, and that now the decision making becomes less about self-reflection and more about, well, confidence…)