Discovering the Unseen
Rust. Crawling over a terrain of twisted and pocked metal, crystalline orange browns, its Rorschach beauty laced with the reminder that it is the harbinger of gradual decay and eventual demise. I am simultaneously seduced and humbled by its inevitable arrival, which subtly reminds me of my own mortality. In response to this malaise, I make objects that point to an imagined past, and come to us as vestigial relics that have long outlived their original purpose, now revered for their unfamiliarity and strange grace. They emerge from the intellectual underbelly of memory and dreams and are made real as remnants of a survivalist mythology, in which concepts of cultivation, propagation, birth, death, and rebirth are manifest as objects of spiritual importance.
This is the framework for recent works suggestive of artifacts and fetish objects, which act as visceral expressions of sensuality, as much about the tactile quality of their surfaces as their suggestion of vestigial disconnection and ritual importance. Implement-like objects seem awkwardly beautiful, and function as self-conscious reminders of some other place, where what is real is exchanged for what might have been.
This group of work represents a process of intuitive making, tearing down, and remaking, which points to the heart of my creative process, to the revelation that occurs when I recognize for the first time the intimate relationship of elements that before seemed disparate and awkward, unexpectedly revealing a dialect that altogether transcends the potential of their original, fragmented language. It is the profound and complete thing that emerges from the mess and detritus of the studio floor, when moved to the sanctuary of the public arena becomes a symbol for all that was left behind. Certainly, it is all that detritus -- the process is inseparable from the art.
-- Ken Jones
Rust. Crawling over a terrain of twisted and pocked metal, crystalline orange browns, its Rorschach beauty laced with the reminder that it is the harbinger of gradual decay and eventual demise. I am simultaneously seduced and humbled by its inevitable arrival, which subtly reminds me of my own mortality. In response to this malaise, I make objects that point to an imagined past, and come to us as vestigial relics that have long outlived their original purpose, now revered for their unfamiliarity and strange grace. They emerge from the intellectual underbelly of memory and dreams and are made real as remnants of a survivalist mythology, in which concepts of cultivation, propagation, birth, death, and rebirth are manifest as objects of spiritual importance.
This is the framework for recent works suggestive of artifacts and fetish objects, which act as visceral expressions of sensuality, as much about the tactile quality of their surfaces as their suggestion of vestigial disconnection and ritual importance. Implement-like objects seem awkwardly beautiful, and function as self-conscious reminders of some other place, where what is real is exchanged for what might have been.
This group of work represents a process of intuitive making, tearing down, and remaking, which points to the heart of my creative process, to the revelation that occurs when I recognize for the first time the intimate relationship of elements that before seemed disparate and awkward, unexpectedly revealing a dialect that altogether transcends the potential of their original, fragmented language. It is the profound and complete thing that emerges from the mess and detritus of the studio floor, when moved to the sanctuary of the public arena becomes a symbol for all that was left behind. Certainly, it is all that detritus -- the process is inseparable from the art.
-- Ken Jones
