The Chinese Seismic Investigations present Emily Jones and Nina Wiesnagrotzki joint exhibition is on at the temporary Berlin space, opening February 11 and running to March 4.
Alongside new work by Jones and Wiesnagrotzki is a text written by fellow artist Holly White who also performed a reading on the night of the opening.
“A fox had died in the bushes on the side of the motorway. We had to walk up the hard shoulder 3 times that week and the smell got worse each time. But eventually it didn’t smell anymore. We remembered when people lived here and talked about cities we could move to. Later we walked through the village and found a button that, when you pressed it, played recordings of people applauding.” – excerpt from Holly White’s, Green Flash (2016).
The installation consisted of sculptural interventions by both artists, as well as a film by Wiesnagrotzki shown below. Chinese Seismic Investigations examines “earthcult, human-technology-nature-counter-realities, and alternative body languages of history, science and politics as unstable utopias of the future.”**
The issue explores the complexities of the ‘personality disorder’ with new perspectives on “identity, the virtual, transcendence and how our aesthetic embodiment relates to capitalism.” Looking at the ways our “psychic/social ecology meets with the environmental in haemorrhage of inner to outer”, the focus relates to the overarching aim of the zine which is rooted in “ecology’s muddled identity.”
Emily Jones is presenting solo exhibition Echolocation at Turin’s Almanac, opening October 27 and running to December 10.
The show is the first one in Almanac’s second space in the Italian city, and will include a text by Caspar Heinemann. The press release reveals little about the London-based artists’ new project — who’s work within flattened taxonomies, algorithms and systems was explored in a thoughtful review of her The Hudson River exhibition at London’s Lima Zulu in 2014 — but typically includes an assortment of words that immerse us in what feels like a Google search.
It moves between content and a level of emotional impact:
Abjects, a group exhibition at Berlin’s Import Projects, curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, brought together artists’ Eloïse Bonneviot,Emily Jones, Paul Kneale, Yuri Pattison andAndrew Norman Wilson,which ran from September 19 to October 25, 2015. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject is summarised in the press release, acting as a foundation from which the works depart and expand on a contemporary experience of the vulnerable body. Shifting from a focus of disgust and revulsion at the raw corporeal materiality, the exhibition finds disturbance within the disparity between a disembodied, infinite connectedness of the immaterial and the opaque constraints produced by the digital economy. The works reflect on the hidden pathways that lurk under, above and in between a contemporary experience mediated within the age of technology and information.
The installation is clean and institutionalised. Pattison presents us with a makeshift desk made of steel shelving titled ‘productivity table’. Six Modafinil tablets (used for combatting fatigue and distraction) are laid out beside a Google prototype computer. The exposed aesthetic extends into ‘dust, scraper, fan .1-5′; a set of five rectangular acrylic boxes placed on the wall and floor of the gallery. Jones’ ‘The Draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes of Iraq’ combines a picketing aesthetic with factual and instructional language within three separate sculptural assemblages. Sitting between a cenotaph and a memorial, a yellow sign that reads, “They were shouting and singing at the top of their lungs” is held up by bits of wood clumsily nailed together. Beside that lies another yellow sign quietly placed on the floor that announces, “The use of force may be necessary to protect life.”
Framed between the signs in the first room, Bonneviot’s tent sits in the doorway of the second. Titled ‘Thinking Like A Mountain—Limited’ the installation fills the small personal space with camping gear, energy bar wrappers, notes of paper and a laptop playing a video game. The recreation is unclear but the aesthetics combine the act of trekking, whether in camping, protesting or the passing of time in a ‘gaming hole’.
Also strongly focusing on material and its residue, Wilson’s ‘Global Mosquito City Proposal’ uses the hardware of a computer to create a sci-fi housing scenario. Two dolls are propped on top of each other in a sexual act. Computer parts, concrete, resin, oil paint, pepper, plastic, acrylic paint, foam and cotton are forced together into an abrasive dollhouse. Beside it, a proposition to Bill and Melinda Gates asks for a contribution of “their blood to malaria mosquito larvae that could potentially be nurtured in this computer-habitat to erase all human beings around the world.”
Outside the window, a bag of water hangs delicately. Titled ‘Insect Repellant’ it encases hydrochloric acid, liquified coins, and copper. In contrast to the sic-fi machine invested manifesto, Kneale’s ‘Aphasia Tags and Performative Empathy’ presents abstract images; the content barely recognisable. Light and hopeful, the images are layers of time made by using the ‘scan’ function of a printer, leaving the lid open. The mechanics replace the intent, and the painterly result is naturalistic in its use of space, daylight and floating particles.**
The Grand New group exhibition is on at Berlin’s Future Gallery, opening February 19 and running to April 2.
The gallery has recently moved from their space in Charlottenburg to a new location in Schöneberg, and is celebrating with an impressive line up of artists, including Emily Jones, Martin Kohout, Kareem Lotfy and Katja Novitskova.
Emily Jones launches the third part of her trilogy with We Are The People We Have Been Waiting For, running at London’s Arcadia Missa from November 13 to December 12.
Following Orange House Action Clinic at Portland’s S1 earlier this year and First Water to Tripoli at London’s Jupiter Woods last year, We Are The People We Have Been Waiting For is the final piece of the artist’s ongoing research, focused on “taking everyday subliminal surfaces and utterances out of their typical scenes”.
On the November 13 opening, Jones will be reading a text entitled GLORY.
Rehearsals in Instability curated by Rózsa Farkas presents a group of artworks at Vienna’s Galerie Andreas Huberthat display certain disbelief –instead of critique –in the situation outlined by the press release of the “current state of capitalism” and “the rising awareness of the unsustainability in this world”. The show, running September 11 to November 7 as part of the 2015 curated by_Vienna programme, deals with the understanding that although “capitalism as we conventionally know it is shifting”, its “increasing financialisation” of everything will continue: it is a “reproductive social contract”.
The works selected by Farkas take on and absorb the processes and gestures by which capitalism works –to take on possible alternatives, to locate new counter-aesthetics and in one fell swoop to have them saturated, creases stuffed, marketed and re-introduced back into an inescapable mode of value and consumer-ability. As the press release highlights, disbelief and absorbency, as opposed to critique and explanation, perhaps produces something stronger in the current climate (both Art World and socio-economic): a nod, or, at the very least, a desire and concern to ‘move beyond’. How does Art escape?
Charlie Woolleymakes two new works, ‘Shelf’ and ‘X’ (4 in a series) which both have shiny strips of aluminium and a sense of reification about their presentation and absorption of stereotypical counter-culture symbols. Emily Jones‘ text lifted from an unknown, un-given context and also, coated in aluminium sits on the wall. Maja Cule, who’s video, ‘Facing the Same Direction‘ (2014) was shown in a solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa, which Farkas runs, is accompanied by a slate plaque on which is etched ‘Do What You Love’ in bubble-writing that’s been filled in. Sidsel Meineche Hansen displays circular and patterned works that call into vision the cyclical production of artwork and its formed subjects. The works of Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Richard Nikl literally hold up the delicacy and instability of dissemination, or how things are constantly newly mediated outwards, traded out, packaged up ‘comfortably’ and as given as “the fabric of our society”, as the press release describes.
The Rehearsals in Instability group exhibition, curated by Rózsa Zita Farkas is on at Vienna’s Galerie Andreas Huber,opening September 10 and running to November 7.
Emily Jones brings her latest exhibition to Portland, Oregon’s S1, titled Orange House Action Clinic and running at the gallery and project space from May 28 until June 28.
Artist-run S1, directed by Erik Carlson, Felisha Ledesma, and Alex Ian Smith, brings Jones’ solo show which, like always, is introduced via a series of evocative and seemingly disjointed images and phrases. Words like “martyr” and “apostle” and followed by non-sensical dyads like “peninsula / imposter” and “diametric / innocence”.
The exhibition’s FB page comes with a series of images, also accompanied with dyadic images of sculptures and close-ups of encrusted jewels presented with phrases like “Firm\firmament – The Great Halls of Listening (you are forever you are forever you are forever you are forever)”. None of it quite adds up in introduction but makes sense in the peculiar taxonomy of Jones’s work, to be expanded on in a panel discussion with the artist, along with Eleanor Ford and Matt Carlson on May 29.
The blip blip blip art space in Leeds is hosting a group exhibition this month, titled Exquisite Collapse and running from February 3 to February 25.
Curated by Jupiter Woods co-founder Carolina Ongaro, the group show takes a Brion Gysin quote as its inspiration, building on his conceptions of abstracted realities and shuffled semantic orders: “The process of shattering and decoding words and images has the potential to exceed existing myths and the official systems upon which we base our knowledge,” the press release writes.
Rome’s The Gallery Apart brings its latest group exhibition, titled biotic/abiotic and running to their space from November 26 to January 24.
The show comes out of the Jupiter Woods curatorial platform and takes the idea of interconnectivity directly into its design, curated by Jupiter Woods’ Hanna Laura Kaljo and Lucy Lopez and in collaboration with The Gallery Apart and the Nomas Foundation.
Featuring eight different artists and artist collaborations – including Emily Jones, Chiara Camoni, Jacopo Miliani and V4ULT‘s Anna Mikkola among others – biotic / abiotic explores the points of connection (and dissolution) between the natural and the cultural.
Artist Emily Jones is bringing her latest solo exhibition, First Water to Tripoli, to London’s Jupiter Woods, where it will run from November 23 to November 30.
In lieu of a press release or exhibition descriptor, Jones has provided the following text:
will-to-possess will-to-live right to silence man-made manomaya man-unmade world as lover, world as self God of the Eastern Sea God of the Southern Sea God of the Western Sea God of the Northern Sea biodiversity is us
On the Facebook exhibition page, she continues to post screenshots of existential phrases, things like ‘million-year timescale’ and ‘this term almost means existing within the cells’. No concrete information is given as to the nature of the show, but judging from Jones’s previous work, we should expect more of the same literary-meets-aesthetic hashtag philosophy that defines her oeuvre.