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UB Art Gallery to exhibit Jones’ work
By KRISTIN E.M. RIEMER
Reporter Contributor
A retrospective of the work of artist Kim Jones will open Oct. 19 in the first-floor, Lightwell and second-floor galleries of the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
Shown here in his Mudman persona, Kim Jones will attend the opening reception for a retrospective of his work on Oct. 19.
A public reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. Oct. 19. The artist will be in attendance.
Jones also will speak at 6:30 p.m. on Monday in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts as part of the Visual Studies Speaker series presented by the Department of Visual Studies, College of Arts and Sciences.
"Kim Jones: Retrospective" will be on view through Dec. 17. The exhibition will be free and open to the public.
Although Jones is recognized internationally for his performance art, installation, sculpture and drawing, this is his first full retrospective. It features sculpture, drawings, collages and a photo-documentation time line that offers a comprehensive overview of the artist's performances and installations from 1954 to the present. The exhibition also features two large-scale installations conceived for this exhibition.
Jones was born out of the 1970s performance art movement in Southern California, where he became widely known for his alter ego, Mudman. Caked in mud, bearing a lattice appendage of sticks attached to his back and wearing a headdress and nylon mask, this unsettling, itinerant figure appeared on city streets, beaches, in subways and in galleries. Connecting the abstract, formal investigations of process and material-based artists and the intense physicality of body-based performance, Mudman evolved from Jones' early stick sculptures, tightly bound in what would become his signature materials of nylon, rope, electrical tape and foam rubber. Jones uses documentation of Mudman, as well as sculptures that result from performances and installations, to develop an idiom of forms and hybrid creatures—inspired, in part, by Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse—that appear throughout his drawings.
Two pivotal moments in Jones' life profoundly inform the content of his work. He was born in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1944 and as a child was diagnosed with a polio-like illness that confined him, first to a wheelchair and then with leg braces between the ages of 7 and 10. Thirteen years later, he served for a year as a Marine in the Vietnam War. Traces of these ordeals reverberate throughout his work, which deals with war, confinement and catharsis.
His frequent reuse of materials and motifs in his artwork has resulted in a core imagery that demands an inquiry into cultural representations of violence. As if recalling a trauma or enacting a ritual remembrance, he reworks select drawings and sculpture, which explains why most of them reference multiple dates spanning decades.
Jones' drawings fall into two distinct categories. The first group portrays landscapes in which humans morph into animals or exist in a symbiotic relationship with prosthetic devices. The second category is Jones' "War Drawings"—two-dimensional, battlefield diagrams done painstakingly in pencil and erasure marks that endlessly pit the "x-men" and "dot-men" against each other. Included among them in the UB exhibition is a 35-foot, floor-to-ceiling drawing that sprawls across three walls of the Lightwell Gallery, providing powerful and timely commentary on eternal confrontation and diplomacy.
Jones received a B.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles and an M.F.A. from the Otis Art Institute, also in Los Angeles. During the past 30 years, Jones' work has been featured in significant group exhibitions, including "Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque," Site Santa Fe (2004); "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object," Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1998); "Mapping," Museum of Modern Art in New York (1994); and "Choices," New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1986).
"Kim Jones: A Retrospective" was organized by Sandra Firmin, a curator in the UB Art Galleries, and Julie Joyce of the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University-Los Angeles. An accompanying 160-page monograph published by MIT Press, "MUDMAN: The Odyssey of Kim Jones," features four essays, more than 50 color plates and a comprehensive bibliography. Essayists include writer-historians Robert Storr and Kristine Stiles, as well as Firmin and Joyce.
Following its stay at UB, the exhibition will travel to the Luckman Gallery, where it will be on view March 24 through May 19, 2007.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are made possible through the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Fifth Floor Foundation.
The UB Art Gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with extended hours to 7 p.m. on Thursday. The exhibition and gallery will open at 2 p.m. on Oct. 27. For information, call 645-6912.