Jennie C. Jones

Passing Tones and Broken Chords
Jennie C. Jones, 2015. Photo: Jason Frank Rothenberg.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Jennie C. Jones’ first exhibition with the Gallery, Passing Tones and Broken Chords. The show features new 2020 Acoustic Panel Paintings that further expand on the artist’s research into the sonic, honing her use of materials and approach to color and form.

Seamlessly integrating the visual with the aural, Jones’ paintings’ titles underscore their connection to sound. Drawing on musical terminology, works like Tempo Grave (Marking Dark Time) (2020) and Tempo Largo (Marking Dark Time) (2020) reference slow, dirge-like speeds of music. Reinforcing this solemnity, the canvases’ black panels also allude to mourning. Signaling Jones’ return to black monochromes, these two paintings are the first the artist has created since 2014.
However, in a departure from earlier black pieces, Tempo Grave (Marking Dark Time) and Tempo Largo (Marking Dark Time) incorporate painted acoustic panels into their compositions. Jones describes how the process of allowing paint to evenly soak into the fabric panels to create subtle tonal variations “…became an existential back and forth struggle … towards an impossible flawlessness.” Expanding on the considered nature of her works’ surfaces, she writes, “Underpainting is becoming more and more critical to my process. The layering with the ‘memory’ or passing time of previous brush work is apparent in the soft impasto and ghostly brush strokes embedded in the monochromatic surfaces.”

Like Jones’ Tempo works, the layered surface of Bright (Red) Gracenote (2020) also suggests the passage of time. The painting’s richly pigmented planes juxtapose painted felt against canvas, and recall Jones’ assertion that her surfaces “… are not flat if you move with enough deliberation, step to and from them as if within them.” Highlighting the labor required to create such effects, the artist ultimately challenges the connection between the reductive and Minimalism, characterizing her own Minimalist process as defined by “maximalist” techniques to erase her hand. As she argues, “The idea of lack can be turned on its head in order to be perceived as pure potential and opportunity. Perhaps this relates directly to African American improvisation and creative utility, to working inventively with spare means.”
Jennie C. Jones: Passing Tones and Broken Chords, installation view, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY (2020)

Further capitalizing on the “pure potential” of her materials and evocatively spare visual language, in works like Fractured Crescendo, Red Rest (2020) Jones experiments with new applications of color. Foregrounding what she characterizes as a “hot” red acrylic, the canvas boasts a diagonal line of bright red paint across two acoustic panels. In contrast to this slashing introduction of color, Deep Structure (Oxide Rest) (2020) features uneven bands of darker red pigment that accent the channel between two panels. The artist explains, “The subtle lines inside the picture plane rather than at the edges are a way of almost painting the shadows of form, which is again a shift toward amplifying objecthood.”

Emphasizing objecthood, Jones’ painterly approach ultimately interrogates the legacy of Minimalism. “There are social and political ramifications to rejecting ‘subject’ and embracing ‘object’—as an African American woman, much more is at stake,” she concludes. “Minimalism becomes a radical gesture empowering a refusal to sell my narrative or bodies.”
In Deep Structure (Oxide Rest) (2020), Jones paints horizontal bands of deep red oxide across two acoustic panels. For Jones, these lines are a "… way of almost painting the shadows of form … a shift toward amplifying objecthood." Highlighting the material components of the painting, Jones' addition of rusty red acrylic draws attention to the seam between the two panels while its horizontal geometry, slightly weighted on the bottom, recalls that of musical notation for a whole rest.

Jennie C. Jones

Deep Structure (Oxide Rest), 2020

Acrylic painted acoustic absorber panel and acrylic on canvas

48 x 48 x 3 in (121.9 x 121.9 x 7.6 cm)

Inquire
- Jennie C. Jones
  Tempo Grave (Marking Dark Time), 2020
  Acrylic and acoustic panel on canvas
  48 x 48 x 2 in
  121.9 x 121.9 x 5.1 cm
- Jennie C. Jones
  Tempo Largo (Marking Dark Time), 2020
  Acrylic and acoustic panel on canvas
  48 x 36 x 3 in (121.9 x 91.4 x 7.6 cm)
(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).
Jennie C. Jones

Passing Tone (soft gray), 2020

Acoustic absorber panel and acrylic on canvas

48 x 36 x 2 in (121.9 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm)

In recent paintings in this series, Jones continues to expand her research into the sonic, illustrating aural experiences visually through innovative approaches to geometry, color, and materials. In Passing Tone (soft gray) (2020), she visually illustrates the fading reverberations of a tone. As she explains, “reading from left to right, the dark edge passes through the work emanating on the right side as a release … a passing tone.”

Inquire
The subtle lines inside the picture plane rather than at the edges are a way of almost painting the shadows of form, which is again a shift toward amplifying objecthood. There are social and political ramifications to rejecting “subject” and embracing “object”—as an African American woman, much more is at stake. Minimalism becomes a radical gesture empowering a refusal to sell my narrative or bodies.

–Jennie C. Jones
- Jennie C. Jones
  Fractured Crescendo, Red Rest, 2020
  Acrylic and acoustic panel on canvas in 2 parts
  36 x 49 1/2 x 2 in overall (91.4 x 125.7 x 5.1 cm overall)
  36 x 24 x 2 in each (91.4 x 61 x 5.1 cm each)
- Jennie C. Jones
  Bright (Red) Gracenote, 2020
  Acrylic and felt on canvas
  16 x 12 x 2 in
  40.6 x 30.5 x 5.1 cm
Jennie C. Jones

Open Measure (Oxide), 2020

Acoustic absorber panel and acrylic on canvas

Diptych: 48 x 36 x 2 in each (121.9 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm each)

In the diptych Open Measure (Oxide) (2020), she paints strips of deep red oxide on acoustic panels. For her, these lines are a “… way of almost painting the shadows of form…a shift toward amplifying objecthood.” At the same time, their spare visual language recalls that of the artist’s ongoing series of Scores for Sustained Blackness, drawings which deconstruct musical devices—e.g. the staff—in order to present viewers with an expanded understanding of sound.

Highlighting the material components of the painting, Jones’ additions of pigment ultimately emphasize the constructed nature of her work: the layered planes of canvas and acoustic panels. For the artist, this emphasis interrogates the legacy of Minimalism. “There are social and political ramifications to rejecting ‘subject’ and embracing ‘object’—as an African American woman, much more is at stake,” she concludes. “Minimalism becomes a radical gesture empowering a refusal to sell my narrative or bodies.”

Inquire
(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).
Untitled (2018) belongs to a series of works on paper Jones produced to coincide with her exhibition, RPM (Revolutions per Minute) at the Glass House, New Canaan, CT (2018). Continuing Jones' practice of representing aural experiences visually, Untitled incorporates ink-printed staff lines juxtaposed with collaged pieces of paper marked with black and grey brush strokes that are distinct to this series of work.

Recalling expanded understandings of music that were advanced by Fluxus artists and composers like John Cage, Untitled examines the contrast of silence and noise within what Jones refers to as "the gesture of sound." At the same time, the drawing playfully riffs on modernism and minimalism while reflecting on the nature of blackness–forwarding the color, which jumps, dances and flickers across the page–as a liberating one. As the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver ultimately concludes, Jones' use of black is "…about sustaining a tone but it is also about sustaining an identity."

Jennie C. Jones

Untitled (The Glass House works), 1-4, 2018

Collage, acrylic, and ink on paper

20 x 16 in (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Inquire

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Viewing Room

Please provide your contact information to view this page.

Email address *

First name

Last name

By submitting this form you will be added to our mailing list.

Enter

Back to homepage

* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied to communicate with you in accordance with our Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.

Jennie C. Jones: Passing Tones and Broken Chords

Alexander Gray Associates

New York

Germantown

Inquires

Mailing List

Cookie preferences

Viewing Room

Please check your email