Private View of Jordan Ann Craig: Your Wildest Dreams

Your Wildest Dreams is Jordan Ann Craig’s first solo exhibition at October Gallery. Northern Cheyenne artist Jordan Ann Craig creates paintings, prints and textile works which are an exploration of existence, time and space woven from cultural memory and epiphany.

In 2018, Jordan Ann Craig exhibited works as part of October Gallery’s Portal II show. Her latest solo exhibition, entitled Your Wildest Dreams, presents a newly completed series of reimaged hard-edge paintings, which are based on Cheyenne cultural design and autobiographical observation.

The process is meticulous and meditative, often obsessive in mark and repetition. She draws inspiration from Indigenous textiles, beadwork, pottery and landscapes. Her work shares personal stories through abstraction, colour and rhythm. She engages past, present and future to depict Indigenous design through a contemporary lens. Craig creates new narratives within her work while celebrating her ancestors and Indigenous land. Her abstract paintings and prints expand the definition of Native American art, and how culture is transmitted.

The artist explains: “My work keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morning. I've forgotten how to sleep. I tell stories about my childhood, family, trauma, healing and the appealing mundane. Working in series, I explore subjects like the feeling of forgetting how to sleep, my relationships with my sisters, and the translation of language and dreams. The dots and shapes are my words; the stories are in their rhythm.”

Craig plays with colour, abstraction, and optical illusion. Each piece features linear and rigid motifs, yet there is a softness and vulnerability in both the aesthetics and concept. She explores the bold horizontal stripes of Cheyenne composition as well as the repetition of shapes such as the triangle or square grid. The works hold elements of adorned historical objects, as Craig draws influence from moccasins, cradleboard, and even pouches.

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