Larry Jordan is an American artist who makes collage boxes, collage animation and live-action film. He has been living and working in the Bay Area of California since the early 1950s and is one of the founding directors of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative. Introduced to collage by Max Ernst, Jordan went on to work with American surrealist Joseph Cornell, helping Cornell to complete several of his films while creating experimental films of his own. Jordan’s work draws on two-dimensional nineteenth century images put together using the logic of music and the intuition of the unconscious. There is no narrative to be sought and his images are not metaphorical. They are symbolic in the mystical sense: his symbols cannot be explained away, but rather radiate significance to the unconscious. They evoke whatever the viewer is predisposed to, and that is where their power lies. His work brings together disparate material that creates a first-hand experience for the viewer who must complete the meaning of the story. Although he uses images primarily from the Victorian era, his films deal not with nostalgia, but with the freedom that comes from going back in time and in connecting with, as he puts it, “part of the brotherhood/sisterhood of artists from time immemorial.” The pictures he collects often come from discarded books which he resurrects into the wonders that are his films. “Redemption. Yeah, there’s a kind of working with ephemerality and mortality and there’s a kind of making sense of eternal values out of very fragile, perishable goods.” Delicate, magical and inherently beautiful, the works of Larry Jordan. Kitty Aal