I Think This Means I Can Fly

In I Think This Means I Can Fly, Anique Jordan considers how truth is made, inherited, and given form. Working across photography, sculpture, and performance, she unsettles the boundary between visual evidence and belief. Jordan asks what becomes possible when ancestral narratives, dreams, and spiritual knowledge are approached as truth-telling systems. The exhibition grows from Jordan’s research into the Flying Africans, stories of enslaved people who escaped bondage by taking flight, and connections between Gullah Geechee communities of the Carolinas and her family history in Trinidad. These inheritances lead Jordan to question the visual languages through which Truth acquires authority. In the works on view, glitches, shadows, blurs, and disjointed bodies unsettle photography’s promise of visual certainty, closed systems, and stable form. Monumental gridded photographs borrow the structure of devotional displays, inviting us to move between individual scenes and an unstable whole. Four double-sided light boxes create shifting relationships among images and the stories they suggest. In Salt, photographs printed on glass cast shadows beyond their surfaces, extending the work into the surrounding space. Self-portraits explore the forces of flight, while sculptures formed from impressions of Jordan’s body take on human, animal, and otherworldly qualities. Across this body of work, figures multiply, slip out of alignment, and assume shapes that exceed familiar categories.