Exhibition
in New York, NY / United States
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- Jordan Nassar in his Brooklyn studio, August 2025, Photo by Takamasa Ota
James Cohan is pleased to present “Revelation”, an exhibition of new work by Jordan Nassar, on view at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Nassar’s fourth solo exhibition with James Cohan.
In “Revelation”, Nassar reimagines traditional craft techniques across expansive multipanel embroideries and transportative mosaics to explore inherited nostalgia, history, and heritage. His recent embroideries are poignant meditations on color, as well as light and darkness; they reveal and conceal brilliantly-hued landscapes. In the front gallery, mosaics echoing Byzantine ruins wrap around the walls, eliciting the past in a contemporary site.
Nassar’s intricately hand-stitched works were made with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Notably, the geometric motifs extend across the entire plane of the canvases, creating dense walls of patterning that obscure imagined vistas. The shadowy palette of these works reflects a somber reverence, one that is punctuated by moments of brightness. A valley lit by a glowing crimson sun emerges from shades of gray in the aptly named “Between Two Hedges of Silence”, 2025. The artwork titles, as well as that of the exhibition, were inspired by Etel Adnan’s epic poem, “The Arab Apocalypse”. Nassar draws on the close linguistic connection between the Greek etymology of apocalypse with the act of unveiling [from apokaluptein, ‘to uncover, to reveal’]. Viewers are granted a window of what lies beyond from multiple vantage points and perspectives.
Alongside these embroideries, the artist has reconstructed two archaeological antiquities, employing the ancient method of hand-cutting glass. The originals are displayed in the arrivals corridor at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as a welcome marker. The first is a fragment of a mosaic floor from a 5th-6th century Byzantine structure attributed to Bethlehem of the Galilee; in this installation it is intentionally flipped on its side. Nassar has depicted its flora and fauna, mirroring its design and formal qualities, to vividly bring this ruin to life. He also asserts his own aesthetic choices, filling in eroded areas with exotic animals and curving grape vines that nod to the intricate Shellal mosaic excavated from the Wadi Ghuzze riverbed and now housed in the Australian War Memorial.
Nassar describes “the act of remaking them as a tender gesture,” reframing the historical lineage of the craft as he interprets it. “Bisan (Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out) (Deuteronomy 28:6)”, 2025, is the artist’s translation of a square mosaic from the historic city of the same name, decorated heavily with birds with ribbons tied around their napes. Here, Nassar has unbridled the birds of their ribbons. Ultimately, Nassar raises questions about the underlying symbolism of ruins, the implicit power that they project and the narratives they can be used to construct and uphold.
Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007.
Gallery hours Tue-Sat 10 am – 6 pm
Exhibition Duration 05 September – 04 October 2025
Location:
James Cohan Gallery
48 Walker Street
10013 New York, NY
United States
