In the cemetery industry, “perpetual care” guarantees the long-term, uninterrupted upkeep of a gravestone and its surrounding plot. In this monograph, Clay Maxwell Jordan inverts the phrase, applying it with poignant irony to an American landscape that has largely failed to protect its citizens.
Perpetual Care turns its focus to those existing on the periphery. Jordan’s subjects and landscapes are caught in the wake of the “rugged individual” mythos, a distinctly American ethos that has calcified into a precarious reality. Through striking, enigmatic compositions, Jordan creates a visual poem about vulnerability and isolation. The work touches equally on the religious, the existential, and the deeply social realities of modern America, revealing the tension between the foundational promises of the West and the people that are left to navigate its margins.
