CORINNE JONES
ANALOG SUNSET
JUNE 5 - JULY 17
Analog Sunset is the second solo show by Corinne Jones at Situations Gallery. The exhibition consists of a sundial, a camera obscura, a soundscape, and an installation of paintings. The title of the show refers to when the planned obsolescence of analog devices from 2011 to 2013 became publicly known. Although the shift to the digital realm transpired in recent memory, the transition period is largely forgotten.
The first witnesses to experience the causal effects of a beam of light piercing a dark space were most likely prehistoric humans that inhabited caves. In recorded history, both Chinese and Arab inventors independently developed apparatuses that recreated this phenomena. Their systems were adapted and used for centuries to safely study solar eclipses. In the canon of western art, the camera obscura was an instrument used by painters to render perspective acutely. In philosophical terms, the structure of the camera obscura––an enclosed dark room in which a small amount of light is let in to project an inverted image of reality––became a compelling model for ideology. The apparatus provides a relationship to the real yet obscures it, producing simulacra, a bent resemblance. The displacement of image and space signifies something and its other––above and below, light and dark, reality and illusion.
For Analog Sunset, a physical camera obscura was constructed to generate chance observation, a phantasmic glimpse, a moving image unmediated by digital media or algorithms. As eyes adjust in the dark and the spectacle of projected light takes shape, a soundscape fills the room with echoes of the exterior street life. Corinne partnered with audio and visual artist Victoria Keddie, whose career and focus involving field recording and analog production was essential to realizing the soundscape.
A room of paintings is adjacent to the camera obscura in Analog Sunset. Fourteen paintings form a ring around the room. The seven-sided paintings hang across from one another and mirror each other in shape and color, a visual embodiment of the echo. The colors are culled from Corinne's routine trips to her Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, observing the reflective sky and water relationships at different times of day.
On the sidewalk in front of Situations Gallery, a painted circle serves as a sundial. When someone stands in the center they become a gnomon in the sundial. A painted arrow points toward true north and the person's shadow indicates the time of day. The painted sidewalk and the paintings on shaped canvases are two distinct forms of active observation. The sundial suggests that the awareness of one’s shadow as a causal indicator of time can also be a recognition of autonomy. For the viewers inside the camera obscura, an inverted image of an individual in the sundial is visible, but the capture is ephemeral, not recorded or surveilled.
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CORINNE JONES (b. 1972, Memphis TN) currently lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007 and a BFA from The School of Visual Arts in 1996. She has exhibited solo and two-person shows at SITUATIONS, NYC; Jackie Klempay, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of America books, Brooklyn, NY; Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN, and has participated in various group shows including galleries and museums in Miami, FL; London, UK; and Warsaw, Poland. Jones has completed public art projects at the Elizabeth Street Garden, New York; at Madison Park, Memphis, TN; and on Huling Street, Memphis, TN. Her work is held in many private and public institutions including the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Penn State University. She has been an adjunct painting professor at Columbia University and teaches color theory at The Cooper Union in New York. Jones published several editions, "Liam Gillick & Corinne Jones," (Brigade Commerz/Liam Gillick, Limited edition of 50 copies with music by Liam Gillick & Corinne Jones) in 2010, "Plain English," (Letterpress, Limited Edition of 50) in 2014, and "Trends in Repurposed Abstraction" which in 2015 debuted at the MoMA PS1 Art Book Fair.