Jennie C. Jones, Fractured Extension/Broken Time, 2021 (detail). Acoustic absorber panel, architectural felt, and acrylic on canvas in two parts, 121.9 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm each.
NEW YORK, NY — From February 4 through May 2, 2022, an exhibition of new and recent works by interdisciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics will include paintings, works on paper, and a sound installation that responds to the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture by interweaving visual and aural experience.
Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics is organized by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Collections.
Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate architectural felt and acoustic panels to create what Jones calls “active surfaces.” These materials absorb and dampen sound, thus affecting the acoustic properties of their environments and impacting the viewers’ experiences, auditory and otherwise as they move through the exhibition. Protruding from the wall, the works are both a part of and apart from the architectural spaces they transform.
The pieces in the show comprise multiple components and take the form of diptychs and triptychs—arrangements that Jones compares to chords in music. The surfaces of these objects balance a contained Minimalist rigor with gestural painted marks. This interplay between traces of the artist’s hand and signs of its erasure suggests the tension between improvisation and controlled structure evident in avant-garde music. Jones channels in her hybrid objects a legacy of radical Black sonic practitioners who negotiated twentieth-century social experience with compositions that could be powerfully expressive in their embrace of opacity. Far more than “viewers,” visitors to the museum are encouraged to experience the social and physical dynamics of perception as they explore Jones’s works on the first two levels of the Guggenheim rotunda, as well as a sound installation on the sixth level.
Installed alongside Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics invites a surprising dialogue between the two artists for whom music is central to the composition of their respective works. The synesthetic experience of encountering Jones’s art mirrors Kandinsky’s own spiritual belief in art at the intersection of sight and sound.
