Sikkema Jenkins

Jennie C. Jones

06 Mar - 05 Apr 2014

© Jennie C. Jones
Quiet Gray with Black Sub-tone # 1 & 2, 2014
Acoustic absorber panel and acrylic paint on canvas
2 parts
48 x 44.125 inches overall / 121.9 x 112.1 cm
JENNIE C. JONES
Tone
6 March – 5 April 2014

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Tone, a solo exhibition of new work by Jennie C. Jones on view from March 6 – April 5, 2014.

Tone continues Jennie C. Jones’ exploration of the confluences between abstract visual art and African American avant-garde music. At its core her work encompasses cultural, political, and historical ideas surrounding minimalism. As Evelyn Hankins, Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden has said of her work: “Through the most subtle of means, Jones encourages us to re-examine what is missing from the legacy of modernism, and she asks us to reconsider the formal, metaphorical, and historic possibilities—even the promise—of absence.”

Making use of acoustic absorber panels originally designed to reduce sound reflections in recording studios and public performance spaces, Jones’ “acoustic paintings” are visually grounded in the reductive strategies of minimalist ideology. With a close attention given to the canvas edge, these works are often created to reflect or bounce halos of painted color onto the surrounding gallery wall. This suggests both the physicality and transcendent quality of sound, or, in short, the visual reverberation and representation of a tone.

In expanding her interest in graphic scores – the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation – and what the artist refers to as the “geometry of listening,” Jones has begun to create an alphabet of her own.

Also included in the exhibition are a series of works on paper as well as a digitally edited audio collage comprised of manipulated feedback tones and mindfully selected sections from acoustic recordings.

Tone explores the liminal space between musical note, line, gesture, and even the constructions of cultural location, in order to excavate the very notion of a longing that reaches towards an understanding of abstraction in itself.

Jennie C. Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1968 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts where she received her Masters of Fine Art degree in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelors of Fine Art, with Fellowship, in 1991.

Jones’ solo exhibition, Higher Resonance, was recently presented at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington DC. She was recently awarded a Joan Mitchell Artist Grant and will be attending the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida later this spring. Her work is currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas in the group exhibition Black in the Abstract as well as at the Institute of Contempoary Art at the Univerity of Pennsylvnia in Philadelphia in the exhibition Roughneck Constructivists. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo project at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
 

Tags: Jennie C. Jones, Joan Mitchell