"Over the past ten years, Jordan Strafer has developed a body of work that interrogates dysfunction within American society. Through videos, films, installations, handmade props, dolls, and drawings, she uncovers apparatuses of power. Her universe is inspired by true stories and events, both private and public, and her works blur genres and gender categories while exploring the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion. Working in the liminal space of similitude versus mimesis, she reveals the artifice inside systems of representation. Dialectical rather than Manichean, her use of common cinema and soap-opera culture introduces doubt into our normal habits, preconceived judgments, and suspensions of belief. Folding reality and fiction, enchantment and raw cruelty, she investigates the inheritance and transmission of institutionalized violence. The following conversation took place in the context of two exhibitions: “LOOPHOLE” at Vienna Secession and “Trilogy” at CAMH, Houston."