"I love the Art World, I have all their albums."
Jennie C. Jones is witty as fuck. In her studio or at her home, I always overstay. She creates spaces that breathe, where you want to sit and talk, and keep talking, and where you find yourself glancing up at the work in progress or on display until you have to walk over and give it your full attention. Plus if Jennie is present, as I said, you will be doubly engaged. It is rare to encounter work so smart and so sublime you can’t stop thinking about how it came into being, and about what the artist who made it might be doing right now. The drawings here are selected from a series of twelve; four were recently acquired by The Studio Museum. The conceptual art of Jennie C. Jones actualizes ideas originating from thinking about jazz: about how and why we listen, “the riff”, co-option, modernism, obsolescence. Encounters with her sculptures, drawings, sound works, and installations morph into imagined memories of the works turning under a pin light. They emit an aura of assuredness, the pared-down refinement of singularity. To wit, observe Jones’s tape case objects. Titled for the “albums” they once held, the pieces haunt, and amuse. I once posited Jones’s work was about emptiness, about that which has been evacuated. “John Coltrane has left the building…and we’re here with Kenny G.” Thankfully, Jones doesn’t traffic in nostalgia. Silence is not simply absence – it can be radical. - AMY SADAO
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