Two artists in Peterborough for their first MacDowell Fellowships, photographer Clay Maxwell Jordan and writer Michael Scott Moore, will present their work tomorrow night at April’s installment of MacDowell Downtown at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. This program is free and open to all; doors open at 7 and the program begins at 7:30 p.m.
Moore, who is currently working on a novel begun while being held hostage by Somali pirates, will talk about his harrowing experience in captivity and the therapeutic value of focusing his mind on a novel. The as-yet unnamed novel centers on a rural California police chief who uses drones to keep tabs on the citizenry. Before starting this fictional work, Moore wrote a memoir, The Desert and the Sea, about his 32 months in captivity after being kidnapped on a reporting trip in 2012.
He started writing about the fictional California surf town after his captives kept taking his notebooks from him and he was hearing drones overhead all the time. “By that time I had my notes stolen twice,” said Moore, explaining he was keeping track of his detention. “So I just wrote something to distract myself. When they realized I wasn’t writing about them, they just let me keep the notebooks.”
When Moore emerged from captivity — both on land and for a period of five months on a hijacked tuna boat — he had five journals filled with notes. “After having written the sketches, I realized I did something therapeutic just by putting the novel in structural order.”
A graduate of the University of California San Diego in German studies, Moore became a theatre critic in San Francisco before moving to Germany to write for an online news magazine. It was there he became interested in Somalia and went there for what proved to be a fateful research trip.
Clay Maxwell Jordan will talk about his journey from playing guitar in a rock band by night and working an advertising job by day to ditching the day job in favor of photographing the street life of Portland, Oregon. His commitment to that documentation earned him a spot at the University of Georgia’s graduate program and his first book of photographs was published early in 2019, almost six years after earning his M.F.A.
“It’s kind of just documenting what it feels like to be going through these trials that all humans face,” Jordan said of his book Nothing’s Coming Soon. “Its thesis is loosely based on the Buddhist idea that life is suffering. I am just trying to show what a struggle life is when one is aware of one’s mortality, but intercutting this somewhat sobering notion with elements of beauty and humor.”
Jordan finds beauty in everyday things and takes a very “open-ended” view of the world, a process evident in Nothing’s Coming Soon. The collection of color plates documents scenes that Jordan happened upon essentially by chance over a period of six years. “I’ll drive around until something catches my eye, whether a person or a place, and I shoot it,” says Jordan.
“We all share mortality, and we are flawed and we should probably just accept our flaws instead of treating them like something that can be solved in a day. It would make for less stress.”
For the MacDowell Downtown audience, Jordan will show slides of his experimental work, street life images from his Portland days, and the recently published images as a way of illustrating his progression. He says his photography, in many ways, is a “repudiation of the selfie craze” in the sense that he wants to show a more human side in his photos – photos that have nothing to do with branding.
While Jordan – who has done teaching stints in photography at Georgia College and the University of Georgia – says that rock and pop music were his first loves, he is quick to point out that he has always been interested in its visual aspects. He believes the album covers he was drawn to at an early age primed him, in a matter of speaking, for appreciating photography later in life. But that rock musician? Well, he’s still there, too.
Jordan still plays and records with PacificUV, a band that has four albums to its credit.
For an extraordinary evening with two deeply committed artists, don’t miss Clay Maxwell Jordan and Michael Scott Moore at MacDowell Downtown at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. The presentation begins promptly at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m., with light refreshments served.