Jennie C. Jones “Amplitude”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

This event has ended.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Amplitude, a solo show of new work by Jennie C. Jones, on view in the back galleries.

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 hardedge geometry found in music notation.

Amplitude emphasizes innovative risk in the artist’s typically rather restrained hand and nods towards a new loudness in her voice and interest in the audible.

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 Arts.

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.