Galerie Arratia, Beer

Brooklyn-based artist Jennie C. Jones’s work reflects on the cultures of sound and music in a visual context. In recent years, she has presented cerebral and imaginative responses to what she calls “the physical residue of music,” using strips of audiotape, bits of wire, instrument cables, cassette casings or working on acoustic panel, in audio and drawing. She is interested in transforming the commonplace collateral of listening into a minimalist art form, remaining in the territory of the formal language of both analogue and instrument as we transition into an ethereal digital age.

Harmonic Distortion is an exhibition of sound, instrument cable ‘sculptures’ and works on paper that reference the abstract language of silence and tone.

Jennie C. Jones operates in the space where art history and black history intersect, concentrating on the abstract, minimal and formalist languages of modernist art forms merged with the conceptual ideologies and techniques of avant-garde jazz and fusion. It is from within this radical legacy of experimentation, wit and riff that Jones’ work in audio, sculpture and drawing manifests itself. Seen as both a comment on and a continuum of these art forms; Harmonic Distortion will present work exploring hybridizations between ‘acoustic and digital’ as well as ‘dissonance and resonance’, functioning as a metaphor that searches for a more historically inclusive and complicated brand of neo-modernism.

A series of sculptural ‘drawings’ made from instrument cable are plugged directly into the gallery wall. The medium of these works— noise canceling instrument cable—is part of the electrical apparatus used in the capture and editing of the ‘music’ featured in this exhibition, with an obvious nod to their proper use existing in the series of small ink ‘portraits’ of amps.