Alex A. Jones
Alex A. Jones is a writer currently based in Brooklyn. Her project “Art and Ecology in the Third Millennium” is supported by the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In Conversation
HANNE TIERNEY with Alex A. Jones
Twenty years ago Hanne Tierney founded FiveMyles, a non-profit art space in Crown Heights. To readers of the Rail who go back a long time in New York, perhaps those have a shared history with Tierney in the SoHo art scene, FiveMyles is a familiar and highly regarded establishment.
In Conversation
ELLEN BERKENBLIT with Alex A. Jones
Once a part of the East Village scene, Ellen Berkenblit has been showing in New York since graduating from Cooper Union in 1980. Her earlier paintings had an affinity for the tubular, economical figure-style of vintage cartoons and comics, but have since sharpened, featuring pointy, angular forms and contoured intervals of explosive color.
In Conversation
SHARA HUGHES with Alex A. Jones
I met with Hughes before the opening of In Lieu of Flowers to discuss the evolution of her work and her relationship to the landscape genre. Hughes is quick to confirm that her paintings arent really about nature, which begs the most interesting question: what are they about?
Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio
By Alex A. JonesOf all the forms of fine art found in Chelsea today, the art of communicating with spirits remains little-represented. Ricco/Maresca is one of the few galleries known for bolstering self-taught artists. The current show unveils a practice which has been mostly hidden in Grant Wallaces family archive since his death. However, it would be a mistake to label his work outsider art.
Aneta Bartos: Monotropa Terrain
By Alex A. JonesIn an erotic view of nature, the body is a psychedelic concept. That is to say, its a matter of altered perception. The body can swell to replace the scientific and colonial terms that typically delineate nature: an ecosystem is a body; the land is a body. It is the mutability of the bodyand the eros of its constant becoming and unbecomingthat Aneta Bartos touches with her video-based exhibition Monotropa Terrain.
Ivy Haldeman: The Interesting Type
By Alex A. JonesSince 2016, Ivy Haldeman has been exhibiting erotic paintings of feminine, anthropomorphic hot dogs. These ladylike link-sausages, with pouting lips, svelte human limbs, and Cinderella-heels are seen lounging seductively inside pillowy hot dog buns.
Betsy Damon: Passages: Rites and Rituals
By Alex A. JonesBetsy Damons current solo show in New York successfully frames her as a pioneer of such a healing practice, and as a key artist through which to consider the relationship between art and activism.
Ella Kruglyanskaya: Fenix
By Alex A. JonesThe most revealing painting in Ella Kruglyanskaya's show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise is Painter, Discontented (2018). The seven-foot-tall oil depicts a painter in messy negligee sitting before a canvas, onto which a few marks have been splashed from the brush in her hand.
DARREN WATERSTON:
Ecstatic Landscape
By Alex A. Jones
These paintings invited the joy that is particular to landscapes, allowing us to experience the panel not as a mere decorated surface, but as an imagined place.
JONATHAN MONAGHAN:
The Disco Beast
By Alex A. Jones
Monaghan’s show investigates the unicorn as a symbolic being, demonstrating in surprising ways its historical richness, multivalence, and relevance to the digital age.
Kathy Ruttenberg: Twilight in the Garden of Hope
By Alex A. JonesThe courtyard of Chinatown gallery Lyles & King is a brick-and-concrete panopticon of apartment windows looming five stories high. AC units pump stifling exhaust into the air, combatting a July in which global heat records were set. But the machines buzzing is broken by a babble of cool water, which streams from a spout-like branch in the face of an anthropomorphic tree. It is the centerpiece of Kathy Ruttenbergs fountain installation, which turns this glorified air shaft into a paradise garden.
MARY REID KELLEY and PATRICK KELLEY:
We are Ghosts
By Alex A. Jones
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s films This is Offal (2016) and In the Body of the Sturgeon (2017) approach the grim mysteries of death with madcap humor.
Viktor Timofeev: God Room
By Alex A. JonesUpon entering the apartment gallery, the resonant sound of a slowed-down clock pendulum conjures a sensation of time slipping slowly away, similar to the attenuated experience we may associate with waiting.
Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: Delights of an Undirected Mind
By Alex A. JonesThe forest and the house are two psychologically-charged domains in the Western imaginary, both ruled by the play of light and shadow. When we cant see the far edge of the trees, a forest becomes an unfathomable mystery, and its secrets take on a more threatening character with the fall of night.
The Institute of Queer Ecology: Metamorphosis
By Alex A. JonesThe four-episode series resembles an educational nature show, with essays spoken over digital animation and found footage, narrated by nonbinary artists Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski. As its name implies, Metamorphosis takes multiple forms as an artistic project.
ecofeminism(s)
By Alex A. JonesYou could say it is a terrible time to open a gallery show. New York City languishes in an ongoing lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic, while a nationwide civil rights movement calls for our attention. But for one of the few exhibitions recently opened in the city, the timing feels powerful. It is a show about ecological urgency in the time of a global crisis. It speaks to activism as an artistic strategy, and points to the entanglement of struggles for social and environmental justice.
Genevieve Goffman: Here Forever
By Alex A. JonesWhat future epoch do our own dreams precipitate? Goffman points to the importance of our collective fantasies, which are not only escapist pastimes, but dreams that race ahead of us, bearing on realitys course.
BLINN & LAMBERT:
New Grey Planet
By Alex A. Jones
Blinn & Lambert’s multimedia exhibition New Grey Planet feels as much like a theoretical experiment as an aesthetic experience. Presenting still life and video works that juxtapose the effects of CGI and 3D imaging with material forms, the artists invite us to participate in exercises of perception that complicate the ontology of objects through technological vision.
Michelle Handelman: LOVER HATER CUNTY INTELLECTUAL
By Alex A. JonesMichelle Handelmans body of work Hustlers and Empires, of which a new installment currently appears at Signs & Symbols Gallery in the Lower East Side, is a symbolically-layered, operatic examination of the hustler. Here the label encompasses those who transgress societys norms as a way to survive, and those who must survive in spite of their transgressions, including the sex worker, the pimp, the drug dealer, the addict, the queer outsider. The newest film, LOVER HATER CUNTY INTELLECTUAL, focuses on a character who is in fact a layering of persons, portrayed by the queer feminist artist/activist Viva Ruiz, whose performance is partly autobiographical and partly inspired by the libertine 20th-century novelist Marguerite Duras.
SUMMER WHEAT:
Swamp Hunters (2018)
By Alex A. Jones
This painting appeared in a solo show at Andrew Edlin Gallery called Gamekeepers, a title which refers to those who manage land to ensure proper conditions for hunting wildlife. It is a paradoxical stewardship, nurturing life to prepare for the hunt.
ANGELA HEISCH:
Resting Position
By Alex A. Jones
The thirteen paintings in Resting Position, all completed in 2018, range from 16 to 36 inches square, a modest scale that invites contemplation rather than immersion.
JOHN McALLISTER:
cymbals of sleep uncurtain the night
By Alex A. Jones
Despite the humming palettes of pink, orange, violet, and indigo, it feels chilly in these paintings. Maybe it’s because now, in late March, we enter the gallery from the frosty street with ever-more impatience for the turn of season that these images predict.
A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN
By Alex A. JonesSurveying the national cultural landscape of doomsday preppers, survivalists, contemporary homesteaders, and “tiny house” enthusiasts—communities within which notions of self-reliance and apocalypse can appear as driving fantasies—these four artists of color inject a counter-narrative into a predominantly white—and in some sectors overtly nativist—conversation about the nature of survival in “the end-times.
On Harriet Feigenbaum
By Alex A. JonesThe aesthetic of regeneration is different from the picturesque. It is about the perception of a certain type of beauty found in the surprising incarnation of life as it emerges from neglect, or death. Down in the mining pit, locust trees grow up out of stinking dark water, but as I walk by, a group of colorful wood ducks fly out from their undergrowth, shouting in annoyance.
Double Helix
By Alex A. JonesI worship twin gods, the image and the text. They are like two chemical elements, irreducible to one another. Words calcify meaning, while images abide by a logic of infinite growth. An image can contain the universe, as in a spiral carved upon a stone.
Austin Osman Spare’s Psychopathia Sexualis
By Alex A. JonesThese drawings visualize a grotesque menagerie of sexual beings. It is through a psychological paradigm that Spares erotica must be read, for, like all his work, these drawings emerged from a psychic flow-state in which bodies often personified meaning.
Pen + Brush
By Alex A. JonesPen + Brush was founded in 1894 as a private club for women artists and writers. This makes it older than any other professional womens organization in the United States.