It’s rare to hear an artist self-identify as an “Outsider.” It suggests a self-reflexivity that jars with its very genre, a class of perceived deviants, anomalies, eccentrics, and the self-taught. It’s a band that typically promotes a lack of self-awareness, even a resistance to categorical determinations. To identify as such suggests one has chosen to the attic above our society’s established house. The Outsider’s self-assignation suggests a pride of place after an abiding search for home.

Jordan MacLachlan termed herself an Outsider artist upon our first meeting, a thing she said with ease. She quickly followed this admission with an explanation that she is self-taught (having tried art school, but finding herself allergic). We were standing in her studio, then, a space determined by the presence of her kiln, whose ceramic refuse coats her walls in a duvet of marble dust. Its benches and shelves are peopled with a community of figurative hand-scaled sculptures, a population that colonizes her house, as well, though there it reads like an exhibition. In her studio, the wildness of her sculptures is unchecked, some of them still in process, some of them seeming to be exiled. All of them awaiting assignation.

Historically, Outsider Art (also referred to as Art Brut, or “raw art”) was termed in the early 1970s by critic Roger Cardinal, and applied to 20th-century artists (particularly those working after the Second-World War) who’d been traumatized, institutionalized, ostracized, or resisted formal training. The term has also been used to describe those who have antagonized the structures (or strictures) of artworld “gaming.” The moniker stands somewhat apart from most art-historical appellations, as it’s both been seized by artists wishing to promote their intransigence or protest, and, alternatively, applied to those who are perhaps unwitting, maybe even unable, to appreciate (or resist) its connotation. In either case, the term signals a certain vulnerability, one that warrants caution and consideration in its application.

MacLachlan’s self-identification as an Outsider artist seems to fit, however. It doesn’t read as an excusal, but as acknowledgment, a kind of property. Working in figuration, psychological and sometimes fantastical narratives, and with over-arching and often aching intimacy, MacLachlan’s body of work bears out the assignation. Promoting a personal fellowship with her audience that keens for its empathic understanding, MacLachlan diminutively but confidently occupies a shallow bank between the autobahns directing contemporary-art designations. Her work belies easy itemization, and eschews vogue capitulations. In essence, her work is not on trend. It’s too exposed, too unheeding of aesthetic currencies, too unfinished for contemporary art’s modish postures. For this, we should be grateful.

Sectioned into a triumvirate of narrative contexts, MacLachlan’s Ways of Living exhibition features three densely-populated series that profile our contemporary moment as, at turns, realistic, fantastical, fatal, benign, banal, bottomed out – even grotesque. It’s a testament to MacLachlan’s attention to balance and scale that none of these qualities feels privileged over another; that none of this feels overly directive. Indeed, in this carefully proportioned community of thieves, gluttons, lovers, watchers, mothers, murderers, hedonists, butchers, and lonely hearts, we’re offered a portrait of true democracy.

In one of MacLachlan’s three series, Unexpected Subway Living, a crisis-occasioned scenario unfolds in which commuters are reduced to living as tunnel-dwellers in an indefinitely stagnated train. Under these conditions, MacLachlan’s subjects – normally, we presume, contained, sanative, and civil – spill out, hatch, multiply, and protrude. It’s a sobering and darkly comic scene, a slightly hysteric imagining of our reduced civility and voided generosity when panic turns to despondent acquiescence. MacLachlan’s depiction of leakage, barbarism, and dejection is appalling and odious, of course. But, disturbingly, it also feels quite likely. As the artist continues to remind us in this exhibition, we’re only ever a short distance from our baseline animality.

“In creating this cobbled-together, rough-hewn disaster zone, I was especially aware of that which is essential to being a living creature, to sustaining a life,” MacLachlan writes. “I have heard it said that the three primal instincts are fear, sexual desire, and hunger. We can only aspire to things of greater elevation once are basic needs are addressed, nursed, and sated.” Obliquely referencing Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” here, MacLachlan affects an undiscriminating calm, as though casting a salve over her unnerved and grasping subjects. It’s a sentiment that profoundly pervades this exhibition. Through her implication of Maslow – an early-twentieth-century psychologist who described our evolution in stages, from aggravated need all the way to spiritual satiation (using terms like “physiological,” “safety,” “belongingness,” “love,” “esteem,” “self-actualization,” and “self-transcendence” to ladder our rise to self-actualization), MacLachlan favors a neutral, even equitable attitude towards our basic tendencies and potential for debasement. She allays our discomfiture, coaxes from us objectivity, and gently reminds us of our distance. She encourages a pacific repose in us as we peer over her lawlessness scenes.

I should limit Maslow’s relevance to this series, however. The theoretician apparently controlled his research to only include “exemplary people,” choosing to study “the healthiest 1% of the college student population” over the mentally ill, anxiety-ridden, or neurotic. He defended his control group by stating, “the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple[d] psychology and a cripple[d] philosophy.” MacLachlan employs no such limitations, casting her net without scrutiny, embracing her subjects’ variations. Her equanimity asserts itself through an encompassing of our humanity’s frayed and fretting margins. MacLachlan is generous in her inclusions.

In a second series, Condo Living, the sculptor speculates on an environment that should afford us something softer: safety, comfort, even civilized fulfillment. Describing this series, MacLachlan writes, “This is the place where the three primal instincts are minded and muted, where more refined living and thinking might be pursued.” Her various subjects are pictured in their daily privations and perversions, representing a spectrum of lived feeling that spans loneliness to seediness, permitted pleasure to gross distension. Wantonness seems to bleed out from isolation. This is a community of stacked but segregated figures, collective in their existential drift.

As I consider the vast difference between these two realities – a degraded underground shelter, a tome of stainless cells poised high above the city – I think of the first scene in George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris (1933), where a theater of impoverished and agitating survivalists jostle for space in a crowded Parisian hotel. Orwell’s opening set brings “a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows [are] flung open on every side and half the street join[s] in [a] quarrel.” The spectacle suggests an undesired intimacy forged among strangers, but it feels cozy, even desirable, over MacLachlan’s extreme scenarios that proffer communal debasement or disinfected isolation.

The third series in this trilogy, Zoo Living, pictures a natural – if fantastic – state of perseverance. Wild hogs and hungry hippos – all wrangling trunks and bloody tusks – populate a world ruled by innate necessity. “I very much wanted to be an animal, when I was a child,” MacLachlan writes. “I thought animals had a strength and beauty superior to humans: they can breathe under water; they can fly.” Fear and love, hurt and need, are positioned, here, on equal footing. This reminds of our fangled evolution. Have we arrived at anything more refined, we wonder? Are we removed from this baseline bestiality? (Are we not animals in a zoo of our own design?)

In thinking about MacLachlan’s practice, the idea of the abject is never far from my mind. In an essay on this subject, critic Joseph Henry observes that “Contemporary art has never seemed to understand what to do with the wounded, injured, and broken bodies.” MacLachlan has found a way to retrieve these wayward forms. She locates our rejected, our isolated, and our deformed – our lonely and our wounded. She positions them – us – in familiar environs, ones we know by name – the subway, the condo, the zoo – improvising shouldering, synchronic crowds. Her outliers’ differences and depravities are made equal. They’re offered acknowledgment and allocation. Under MacLachlan’s assured and calming hand, we are, each one of us, an outsider seeking a place to call our own.