RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- Artist Kim Jones connects nature, culture, and memory through a material- and labor-intensive intervention into the galleries and surrounding landscape of
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His exhibition, White Crow, part of the presentation Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place, will be on view at the Museum until February 5, 2017.
Jones (born 1944, San Bernardino, California) has created a singular and subjective body of work based on extreme experiences that deeply affected his life and art making. He identifies himself as an outsider, and this estrangement has been played out through an interrelated series of performances, sculptures, drawings, and writings that exhibit a range of elemental and expressionistic impulses. White Crow refers to the extremely rare occurrence where a crow is born without any pigment in its plumage. This marks the bird as not only an outsider, but also, in folk mythology, as an omen of impending change.
Aldrich exhibitions director Richard Klein, the curator of the exhibition, explains: “Jones has often used stuffed animals and other toys as elements in his sculpture. The rat, which appears frequently, he identifies with as a species that, although usually reviled, is resourceful and intelligent, and lives in close association with human society. In this exhibition, the rat appears as a transitional element/figure, connecting a series of indoor sculptures with what will be the artist’s largest outdoor site-specific work to date. Many of the sculptures included in the exhibition are multi-media constructions that utilize wheeled toys, such as a “Big Wheel,” and their implied mobility suggest both the artist’s personal journey as well as the ad-hoc vehicle of the refugee.”
Jones’s life and work have been tempered by surviving a childhood illness, as well as serving in the Marines during the Vietnam War. The deep-seated memories of these experiences have created an undercurrent of survival in much of the artist’s work, and White Crow expands this concern out into the landscape.
Klein continues, “Jones’s major outdoor installation, made during a two-week residency at the Museum, involves the transformation of a grove of four small crabapple trees into a group of festooned and wrapped sculptures. Additionally, he utilizes The Aldrich’s camera obscura, a small room that looks out on the grove of crabapples, by creating a wall drawing on the camera obscura’s projected image of the trees, linking his intervention in the landscape with the indoor environment.”
Kim Jones was born in San Bernardino in 1944 and lives and works in New York. For over thirty years he has been working on a consistent oeuvre of drawings, sculptures, and performances—war drawings, rat sculptures, combat vehicles, and performances as his alter ego Mudman—that all have their origin in his personal experience, including his participation as a soldier in the Vietnam War and the illness that kept him in a wheelchair between the ages of seven and ten. Jones’s work has been featured in significant group exhibitions, including Kim Jones: A Retrospective, UB Art Gallery, The State University of New York, Buffalo, and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles; the 17th Sidney Biennale; The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, Guggenheim Museum, New York; the 52nd Venice Biennial; Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque, Site Santa Fe; Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and Mapping at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; amongst others. Jones’s work is held in major museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
