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William E. Jones
February
12, 2011 - March 26, 2011
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to
announce an exhibition of new work by William E.
Jones. The exhibition will open on February 12 and
run through March 26. An opening reception will be held on
Saturday, February 12 from 6:00 to 9:00pm. William E. Jones is
an artist, filmmaker, photographer and writer known for using
appropriation, documentary and historical research to call
attention to the inextricable relationships between images and
power. In recent years his focus has shifted away from the
production of films made to be screened in cinemas, and
towards gallery-based works of extreme and concentrated visual
impact. The exhibition will consist of three new movies, as
well as two new print-based works, that investigate the roles
of film and photography during moments of cultural
upheaval.
To
create the movies, Jones applies formal and organizational
strategies to existing photographs and film footage, seeking
to reveal the hidden, and even suppressed, historical
narratives latent in their content. Since Jones works on the
frames individually in Photoshop and then sequences them as
animations, each frame retains an incredibly high level of
photographic detail, and the finished movies occupy an
unstable position between film and video.
In
Mathew Brady's Studio Jones makes use of 100
portraits taken by the seminal American photographer in his
Washington, D.C. studio after the Civil War. These images
represent men prominent in the political establishment of the
time, but Jones pays particular attention to the studio props
with which their subjects are posed; 60 of the photographs
feature a Greek-style patterned fabric, and 40 feature a vase
with a floral relief. The movie consists of three loops
projected next to each other. The sequence on the left zooms
in and out of the fabric, the sequence on the right zooms in
and out of the vase, and the projection in the center zooms
slowly into the subject's face and ends at the eye closer to
the camera. The work draws parallels between a transitional
period in the country's past and the current political
climate, in which divisions loom larger than shared
interests.
Division is also a prominent theme in Berlin Flash
Frames, which uses archival footage Jones found in the
National Archives under the label "Berlin 1961." The footage
was originally shot as a propaganda film by the U.S.
Information Agency, and depicts scenes of life along the
Berlin Wall, oscillating between obviously staged (i.e.
'fictional') vignettes with actors and documentary reportage.
Jones calls attention to moments when the production is at its
least guarded. By exposing the mechanisms of the film, the
work also questions the larger narratives used to disseminate
information about military occupations and the aftermath of
war.
Spatial Disorientation utilizes film footage
shot from the cockpit of a U.S. Air Force plane performing
practice maneuvers in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War,
and is perhaps the most visually complex of the movies Jones
has made to date. The looped image of a cloudy sky spins
vertiginously as the plane spirals through the air. However,
Jones worked and altered digital scans of each individual
frame according to a rigorous mathematical system, creating a
series of variations based on color and motion blurs applied
to the image. During transitional moments, there are intense
stroboscopic effects that challenge the viewer's ability to
look at the work. By interacting with the material in this
way, Jones brings out the psychedelic potential of military
footage, forging an unlikely connection between cultural
forces that are at direct odds with one another.
The
two print-based pieces on view explore documentation of the
Paris Commune's brief seizure of power in 1871. In
Postcards of Versailles, a series of three
postcard-sized prints, Jones superimposes images of
assassinated Communards in their coffins over tourist images
of Versailles. The work takes on the visual quality of a
reliquary, creating an unsettling conflation of two kinds of
photographic records: commercial postcards and images of death
circulated by the French government as warnings to potential
revolutionaries that insurrection would be met with severe
force.
1871, a four-panel work, incorporates
photographs of the Vendôme Column before, during, and after
its destruction by the Commune. In an art historical context,
these images also function as indirect documentation of a key
moment in the life of Gustave Courbet, who was imprisoned
after the French government took back power because he had
suggested that the Column be moved across the Seine. In
keeping with this history, the final panel of Jones' work
includes Nadar's famous portrait of Courbet juxtaposed with a
photograph of the restored Column; the artist seems to be
looking despairingly at the ever-resilient symbol of
imperialist power.
In
2011 William E. Jones will be the subject of
a retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. His work
has been featured in solo programs and exhibitions at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New
York; ar/ge kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano, Italy; Wexner
Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Tate Modern, London,
among others. Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include
The Spectacular of Vernacular, curated by Darsie Alexander,
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Artist's Museum, MOCA at
the Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles; More American
Photographs, curated by Jens Hoffmann, CCA Wattis Institute
for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Serious Games: War –
Media – Art, curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki,
Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany; Nachleben, curated by Fionn
Meade and Lucy Raven, Goethe Institut Wyoming Building, New
York; The Collectors, curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar
Dragset, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale; Beg, Borrow
and Steal, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the 2008
Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York.
Image:
William E. Jones
Installation view
February
12, 2011 - March 26, 2011
David
Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Photography: Fredrik Nilsen
Courtesy
of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
3143 S.
LA CIENEGA BLVD, UNIT A
Los
Angeles, CA 90016
T 1
323-222-1482
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