JENNIE C. JONES
Amplitude
September 8 – October 8, 2016
Concurrent to Leonardo Drew’s exhibition, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Amplitude, a solo show of new work by Jennie C. Jones, on view in the back galleries from September 8 through October 8, 2016.
Jennie C. Jones' work exposes the connections between conceptual and avant-garde African-American music and the cultural, political, and historical ideas surrounding Minimalism and Abstraction. Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of music, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings.
Jones’ distinctive “acoustic paintings,” constructed from industrial sound absorbing panels, suggest both the aural and physical dynamics of listening. While continuing the use of a restrained gray palette, Jones employs red as an activation color, a color she considers a reference to the action of “recording” as exemplified by “in session” indicator lights. The works presented in Amplitude more overtly examine the contrast of silence and noise within "the gesture of sound.” These painterly gestures recall visual representations of sound waves and tone bursts. Jones’ brushwork fuses the representation of the sonic while flirting with the hard-edge geometry found in music notation.
Amplitude emphasizes new risks in the artist’s typically rather restrained hand and nods towards a new loudness in her voice and interest in the audible.
A new sound piece in tandem with this exhibition is available for free download at http://bit.ly/2bc5Zyp. This work addresses transmutation and origin, transferring a work from cassette tape into the digital realm with its final output source being accessible by phone before, during, or after the exhibition.
Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1968, and currently lives and in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts where she received her Master of Fine Art degree in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1991 with Fellowship. She is currently a Lecturer in MFA Sculpture Department at Yale University. Among her numerous awards, Jones is 2016 recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Award presented by the Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Jones’ work has been exhibited at major national and international art institutions including solo presentations at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009); Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2011); The Kitchen in New York (2011); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2013). Compilation, a ten-year survey exhibition of her work curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, was on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from December 12, 2015 through March 27, 2016. A book published by Gregory R. Miller with essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Hilton Als, and George E. Lewis along with conversation between Jones and Huey Copeland accompanied the exhibition.
Her work is also featured in the group exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from September 14 through March 19.