Visiting Ampersand to view Jordan Essoe's "Semaphores" is a unique appointment-only experience in which the very warm and accommodating gallery director and founder, Bruno Mauro, arranges for me to meet with Essoe, a serene and baby-faced young man who speaks softly with a slight hesitance or lingering over his diphthongs.

Essoe brings me first to a relatively literal painting of children playing soccer and explains the context of this piece, "Those Code Systems in Which Not All the Symbols Have Meaning" as a portrayal of displaced Colombian people in a refugee camp. It is a fairly legible scene, though, as Essoe points out, the context may be somewhat unknown, the imagery is fairly lucid. He then turns to the second piece, which at first glance looks like a string of push-pins but is actually a series of eight punched-out holes representing Morse code, a biopsy of the original photo the first painting replicates. It is Morse code for "error" and as it ties into the previous piece, the symbols (the punched-out holes) lose their meaning in too much code. Thus: error.

Error in communication? Error in information? Error in the act of globalization? Error in displacement? All of the above.

This tour has a very determined direction, where the knowledge of one piece relies on the information obtained from the previous. He brings me upstairs to a wall of punched-out holes. The "error" message received and then reinterpreted, re-purposed, reworked, redux. A habitual relapse in communication breakdown.

Stretching his art to the very edge of abstraction by the very carefully calculated act of his intense viewing of the world that is far removed from the effects of globalization and displacement, Essoe's conceptual work deepens the experience and dialogue of these sociopolitical issues.

He is interested in communication, in dialogue, in isolation, in exile, and from what I gathered, the social attempt to bridge these desires, to connect and the resulting happenstance of disavowal. Of his idols and peers, he asks: "If international economic democracy is an alternative to corporate globalization, what does it look like?"

So, what does it look like? In a network of communication, Essoe displays the images his contributors submitted. To go into all the responses could take years: by however one decides to read into the image, or however one decides to read into what the contributor reads into the question. You have to see it to believe it.

What's important about this project is how it ties into Essoe's theme of globalization and communication and semaphores. He says that in a traffic light, yellow is the symbol for transition between stop and go. These contributor-generated images are all mounted on yellow boards, and to tie in the definition of a semaphore, the visual symbols give meaning to the language. Without this connection, dialogue, interpretation of the question, we cannot make the transition in our humanity to fully connect.

The images and installation are cryptic, but with Essoe alongside, the work is deeply haunting and fascinating, resplendent with a deep and complex understanding of the misappropriation of language and the harmful effects it has on the global society as one power exercises this misappropriation as dominion over another entity.

--Jolene Torr

(*Images, from top to bottom: Jordan Essoe, Semaphore, January 16 - February 28, 2009; Ampersand International Arts, Installation view Gallery A, Gallery B.  Jordan Essoe,Those Code Systems in Which Not All the Symbols Have Meaning, 2008, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.  Jordan Essoe, Semaphore, January 16 - February 28, 2009; Ampersand International Arts, Installation view Gallery A.  Jordan Essoe, Semaphore, January 16 - February 28, 2009; Ampersand International Arts, Installation view Gallery B.  Jordan Essoe, A Gold Mask, 2008, digital video, acrylic cases, sugar cubes, 24.25 (w) x 24.25 (d) x 52.5 (h) inches.)