NYAB Event - Simone Jones Exhibition

Simone Jones Exhibition

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

This event has ended.

"Jones' art has to do with ... the way we respond to phenomena, whether they are self-construed object illusions or elements in a natural setting. Jones' machines thus raise questions about the proprioceptive perceptual and structural processes that are part of 'being a human.' No longer merely object-oriented kinetic sculpture as in the days of Naum Gabo or Alexander Calder, Jones' art applies the kinetic dialogue between viewer and self-propelled artwork to make us think and contemplate the way things are." -Flux Machines, John Grande

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts presents two new installations, All that is Solid and End of Empire, by Simone Jones. Jones uses film and kinetic sculpture to explore perception and the relationship between time and space, particularly physical materials' capacity to express temporal characteristics. Jones' work incorporates elements of performance and engages the viewer experientially through a visual navigation of the boundary between real and imagined space.

Themes in the exhibition are influenced by Marshall Berman's book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, published in 1982, in which the author discusses modernization through western literature of the time (Marx, Baudelaire and Goethe, among others) and contrasts this recorded experience with philosophical tenets of modernism. Taking as her premise that nothing is solid, Jones situates her eye partly in the tradition of these visionaries while using digital media to examine the certainty of technological flux in our time.

All That Is Solid, 2011, a four-screen 10-minute 3D animation, combines computer-generated cubes and large shapes suggesting mass with black-and-white photographic images of corridors and staircases highlighting perspective to create a hybrid space both representational and imaginary. The installation is an immersive environment spanning the length of the gallery wall, interfering with perceptual boundaries of foreground and middle-ground in which everything seems unhinged and floating.

End of Empire, 2011, made in collaboration with Lance Winn, is a custom-built robotic dolly and track which projects a 28-minute video inspired by Andy Warhol's 1964 film Empire. The robot's camera arm, invented by the artist to enable the frame's movement, projects a black-and-white video image of the Empire State building across the gallery walls and ceiling and then reverses back to its original position to eventually disappear from the skyline. End of Empire comments on the possibility of a declining American empire, re-appropriating the historic/iconic building as a symbol of loss rather than promise. Transforming the conventional viewing of a film as static object, the audience is forced to physically change positions in order to experience the film as a performative projection.