SUPERBLACK: New Work by Jordan Tate

“SUPERBLACK gives a nice peek into the limits. As science pushes forward, it reaches small breaks and plateaus allowing for contemplation. While art may help us ponder the void and the void in SUPERBLACK is the deepest and darkest you will most likely ever see . . . It pushes forward to find and probe the void.” —Jimmy Kuehnle, ArtHopper

Conceptual artist Jordan Tate premiered a new installation that investigated the nature of blackness through scientific and artistic means. Using a “superblack” material produced through nanotechnology in the laboratories of the University of Cincinnati—where Tate is Assistant Professor of Art—the structure challenges visual perception by allowing no light to escape, and thus, illuminate, its container. Tate’s principal medium is photography and his work often takes photography and its formal interests in light, scale and color as its subject. SUPERBLACK takes his ongoing phenomenological concerns to their conceptual and physical outer limit.

As recent photographs also included in the show increasingly reflect Jordan Tate’s interest in the visual properties of darkness, the SUPERBLACK object functions like a black hole, drawing previously conceived notions (his and the viewers) inexorably towards an abyss. A new artist book with essays that expand on the themes of perception and blackness has been published for the occasion of the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by Transformer Station.