Jennie C. Jones: Compilation

"Jennie C. Jones: Compilation" is a mid-career survey that chronicles Jones’s practice over fifteen years and includes her iconic “Acoustic” paintings, works on paper, sculpture, sound and installation work. The exhibition will debut a new suite of Acoustic Paintings, along with a site-specific installation created for the survey.  Jones uses the metaphor of music notation to echo the architecture of the site–ostensibly adapting to the architecture of the museum.

Jones’s practice mines the territory of Modernism—abstraction and minimalism - along with legacies of experimental jazz, to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century’s social, cultural, and political experimentations. Through extensive research and imagination, Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. 

As a conceptual artist, Jones is adept in a variety of media, intertwining the genres of painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as sound. She frequently uses iconic phrasing from jazz vocalists and instrumentalists as raw material that she fragments, disrupts, and dissolves into associative sounds, which in turn function as distinct installations or in combination with her sculpture and Acoustic paintings.  The Acoustic paintings are composed using monochromatic canvases with soundproof panels.  Often presented in suites, they evoke a physiological response by the viewer, whose recognition of the material triggers an internal expectation of sound. Jones plays upon this psychological expectation, incorporating fragmented sound to mine deep emotional and psychological territories.  In an earlier exhibition, From the Low, the artist created a suite of black on black paintings which were combined with a sound composition or “re-composition” appropriated from low, deep cords and dark notes extracted from selected jazz scores. 
Deutsche Bank has collected several series of the artist’s works on paper since 2005.  Her black and white ink drawings and collages with cut-outs and accents of bold or neon color are signatory.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jennie C. Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1968. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

PUBLICATION
"Jennie C. Jones: Compilation" is accompanied by a monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. The publication includes an introduction and essay by the organizing curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, as well as essays by Hilton Als and George Lewis, in addition to a conversation between Jennie C. Jones and Huey Copeland III. The monograph features color and black-and-white images of the works presented in the exhibition, a bibliography of general reading, and a chronology of the artist’s life and work.

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