Hammer Projects: Jordan Strafer

By Nyah Ginwright

A jury forewoman and a male attorney lock eyes as he pulls a chair closer to the jury box. In front of her, a glass of strawberries sits untouched. The juror leans in to grab a strawberry and bites it slowly. Seemingly overcome by passion, the suited lawyer transitions to the floor, and the juror mounts him, dripping hot wax on his chest from a nearby candle that lights their encounter. Later the juror holds a cigarette. The man lights it, and she blows its smoke in his direction. In the background, a suited man sings “Summer Wind,” a song popularized by Frank Sinatra, as the couple dance slowly, smoke fluttering from her cigarette. Suddenly, the attorney pins the helpless juror to the stand, looming over her. Beneath his gaze, a single tear glides down her face.

This scene appears at a critical moment in Jordan Strafer’s LOOPHOLE (2023), the first in a planned trilogy of videos informed by William Kennedy Smith’s trial for rape in 1991. The video begins with a disclaimer: “This film is inspired by actual legal proceedings and includes testimony from the trial, but this story is fictional. Any similarities of the fictitious characters and incidents to the name, attributes or background of any actual persons, living or dead, or to any actual event is entirely coincidental and unintentional.” LOOPHOLE employs reenactment to decipher the interplay between truth and contradiction, probing the elusive location of virtue within this spectrum. At the center of this exploration is the courtroom as televisual terrain. The legacy of televised trials dates back to the December 1955 murder conviction of Harry Leonard Washburn in Waco, Texas, which was initially broadcast exclusively to residents of central Texas. In 1979 Ted Bundy’s trial on multiple charges of rape and murder captured the attention of national audiences. Occurring two years prior to the highly publicized trials of O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers in 1993 and 1994, respectively, the Smith trial gripped national audiences because of the pedigree of the accused, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Jean Kennedy Smith. The trial ended in Smith’s acquittal.

Lisa, the jury forewoman in LOOPHOLE, is based on a juror who served on the trial and later married Smith’s lead defense attorney. Strafer’s camera lingers on Lisa’s feet before moving up to her face as she emerges from a dark hallway and walks into the courtroom. She wears bright pink and stands out from the other jurors. She takes her seat, and the camera pulls back to reveal the defense attorney as he enters the room. He catches her attention, and they share flirtatious glances in the moments that follow. Next, Sara, the key witness, approaches the stand. Her entrance prompts a change in the style of the video, which takes on a grainy, jerky quality, as if the camera is endeavoring to locate Sara. TV and film scholar Jeremy G. Butler likens this style of camerawork to that of documentary films and notes that it is intended to connote  historical reality.[1] LOOPHOLE alternates between glossy, cinematic imagery and raw, documentary-like footage, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

When the defense attorney approaches the stand to question the key witness, his eyes meet those of the juror, and at this moment a melody emerges. This sound, which comes from outside the world of the video, hints at cinematic artifice. The defense attorney begins to cross-examine the key witness. While questioning her, he utilizes short phrases intended to elicit only yes or no responses. Within the context of the trial, he prohibits any elaboration on her answers; beyond this, he is socializing her to be confined within the order of the courtroom. The attorney engages in what Gregory M. Matoesian refers to as “parallelism,” which he describes as a way of using repetition to exert control over a narrative.[2] In this repetitive strategy, the defense attorney asks a series of seemingly never-ending questions that make it virtually impossible for the key witness to appear truthful.

Much like this cyclical questioning, reenactment proliferates imbalanced power dynamics. Among the precedents for this kind of historical re-creation in recent art is the work of Kirsten Forkert. In Art Workers’ Coalition (Revisited) (2006–), Forkert collected documents and speeches that were created and presented within the context of the organization Art Workers’ Coalition to serve as scripts for her work.[3] Rather than circulating the speeches, she commissioned artists to both rehearse the speeches and explain why they gravitated toward a particular text. Situating reenactment through the lens of politics suits both Strafer’s and Forkert’s work, but Strafer’s more dramatic approach muddies the moral boundaries and emphasizes psychic dissonance. The artist Michele O’Marah’s video How Goes It with the Black Movement? (2007) is another precedent. O’Marah’s economical restaging of the historic interview between Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton and conservative author William F. Buckley offers a loose approximation of the original while being true to its transcript. It intentionally positions itself as an interpretation of a real-life event but effectively signals that the experience is a deliberate construction. In Strafer’s practice, everyday objects, personal experiences, and cultural references all serve as valuable source material. Both her parents were lawyers, and her mother, Holly Skolnick, worked on Smith’s defense team. The character “The Pen” is modeled on Skolnick. Skolnick documented the case and provided a transcript, which Strafer draws on in LOOPHOLE. While some dialogue is adapted from the transcript, the scenes between the juror and the defense attorney are reenactments of short sequences from the erotic thrillers Body Double (1984), Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), Body of Evidence (1993), and Double Lover (2017). The subject of an earlier Strafer work, PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure) (2019), is also tethered to the artist’s life. PEP begins with a shot of a well-dressed blonde doll with lines drawn on her face that suggest premature wrinkles. Standing at a podium, the doll introduces herself as Jordan Strafer and begins telling the story of being sent to a wilderness camp for two and a half years, an experience the artist once endured. A comically large and viscous tear runs down her face as she speaks, and a cotton swab swoops into the frame and gently wipes it away. Throughout the rest of the film, documentary-like footage of teenagers navigating the wilderness is juxtaposed with cinematic depictions of villainous men in masks who enact violence against the youth. This exaggerated portrayal of the men further reinforces the constructed nature of the work. While much of Strafer’s work borrows from her own life experiences, her work is not autobiographical.

The second video in Strafer’s yet-to-be-completed trilogy, DECADENCE (2024), focuses on a party celebrating Smith’s acquittal. The video begins with the camera meandering through plants while the text “1991 / Kennedy Estate / Palm Beach, Florida” pops onto the screen. Women with caked-on makeup mingle around a Mediterranean-style house. A series of victory announcements, awkward encounters, and assertions of innocence ensue. A couple of attentive partygoers listen as the defense attorney explains, “I had to be a gentleman to the jury or else the prosecution would say she was raped twice, once by Mikey, then by me.” This statement, extracted from a Sun-Sentinel article published in 1995 titled “Courting the Jury,” succinctly captures a paradox of the justice system: its prioritization of perception over truth. During the party, a drag performer descends a flight of stairs and begins lip-syncing the song “Unbelievable” by EMF. This scene underscores the idea that both the legal system and the film industry act as fictional pillars of truth. The party guests eventually engage in key swapping: the men place their keys in a bowl, and the women select the keys, determining whom they’ll go home with. While the majority of the women appear hesitant, seemingly to play out of obligation, the juror, Lisa, eagerly chooses the defense attorney’s keys. They eventually find themselves in a dimly lit corner, and a short time later, the accuser’s voice is heard recounting her experience of the night of the alleged rape. DECADENCE pairs the interactions between the juror and the defense attorney with those between the accuser and the accused (Holly and Michael, respectively). Folded into the film are glimpses of a secret wedding between the defense attorney and the juror, which Strafer modeled on the one-minute wedding video that the artist Jeff Koons made to advertise his marriage to the Italian porn actress Cicciolina. The voice of the accuser, asking, “Where are my shoes?,” accompanies footage of the juror’s bare feet splashing through water during her beach wedding. While the newlyweds engage in sloppy kissing, Michael chases Holly through the house as she struggles to escape. For Michael, the pursuit is a game.

These events unfold in a way that suggests parallel realities occurring in and around the trial. The result is a twisted and disturbing atmosphere that permeates Strafer’s work. In its speculative depictions of the night of the alleged rape, the intricacies of Smith’s trial, the party celebrating his acquittal, and the relationship between the juror and the defense attorney, LOOPHOLE and DECADENCE present a dizzying sequence of encounters that reveals the interpersonal power dynamics embedded in public and private interactions.  

1. Jeremy G. Butler, “Notes on the Soap Opera Apparatus: Televisual Style and ‘As the World Turns,’” Cinema Journal 25, no. 3 (1986): 53–70.

2. See Gregory M. Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

3. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Sounding the Fury: On Kirsten Forkert and Mark Tribe,” Artforum 46, no. 5 (January 2008): 95–96.