LUKE SIEMENS
Arts Writer

Jordan Schwab enjoys doing good work.

Subsequently, he must have an interest in his relationship with entropy: the limits on a system’s ability to do useful work.

If one wants to know entropy then evaluating the process in which one produces will yield the amount of entropy within that system.

Schwab’s MFA show How to get Things Done puts us into his process. The gallery becomes his construction site, complete with a “post no bills” wall.

Schwab breaks his artistic process down into a series of works that resembles a contractor’s plan. Instructional drawings are followed by models and photographs of the previous two built in reality.

Schwab’s process, however, does not follow a linear progression. If one goes from drawing to model to photo, they will not only find out how much work they have to do to view something in this manner, as the pieces that fit together are scattered throughout the gallery, they will find out that the drawing may not be the starting point.

In some works, inspiration comes from life (the frame of a condo building on stilts for example). The order of the process may be photo, model, drawing or photo, drawing, model; regardless, the viewer has a tendency toward homogeneity. We can’t help but group like pieces together.

As mentioned previously, one will even put extra work in zipping around the gallery to do so. The effect of viewing the pieces in this continuum like nature is that difference between the three pieces start making themselves evident. The elements, which are gained, lost or changed as they move between the three mediums, become the subject or perhaps the amount of entropy within the three-piece continuum.

The overall effect of the show is that one feels there is no finished product (which is not to say that the work doesn’t look finished) but rather that we are in a continual process going back and forth. Each piece is just a way to get to the next one.

Jordan Schwab’s show, How To Get Things Done, is on display in the Snelgrove Gallery in the Murray Building until Sept. 25
The reception is on Sept. 25 at 7 p.m.

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photo Robby Davis