BENJAMIN JONES
Drawings and Sculpture 1994–2021
NIGHT RABBIT, 2021, styrofoam, paper mâché, black gesso, pins
Exhibition Details:
October 1 - December 22
Reception: Friday, October 1st, 2021 6-9 PM
Laney Contemporary is pleased to present the work of artist Benjamin Jones, whose practice has been established in Atlanta and revered internationally. Drawings and Sculpture 1994-2021 represents a survey of his celebrated work and his experience of isolation during the pandemic.
This exhibition functions as a rescheduled homecoming and a debut within the Savannah community for Jones, who recently moved to Tybee Island. After years focused on personal recovery from familial loss and illness, his studio practice resumed with detail-driven works that finally have a chance to “see the light of day.” This very personal selection of drawings and sculpture reveals the continuities of a creative life, and the connections between past iconography and renewed energy.
Born of chance, and largely produced during late night hours, these new sculptures, including singularly eccentric rabbits, skulls, and elephants came about when Jones uncovered stored boxes of straight-pins and abandoned styrofoam rabbit forms that he had thrifted over a decade ago. Carefully embellishing each form with paper maché and colorful pins, the materials spoke to Jones as discarded and reborn objects from his past and materials for his future, like sculptural pincushions haunting us from a depression-era mentality or homemade Fabergé eggs, they exude a revived sense of re-use culture necessitated during virus lockdown.
The acupunctured fluffle of bunnies and neighboring pierced skulls seem protected with a layer of experience and armor. These anthropomorphized coronavirus-beings have a spiritual presence as if warding away evil; collectables with superpowers. In the mirrored gallery at Laney Contemporary, a first time installation of glass and ceramic animal figurines from Jones’s private collection can be experienced through their spellbinding multiplicity.
Jones’s drawings translate characters and components from his daily journal practice of cataloging current events and personal encounters, media clippings and the fragmentary ephemera of a life lived. Overarching themes and vivid alter-egos punctuated by geometries, permeate his newest work while they all seem to resonate with feelings of love and loss, isolation, contagion and fear, joy and despair. With the most thoughtful attention to detail, line, color and even erasure, Jones considers what it means to make a mark, to punctuate a surface, to feel deeply. Connecting directly with the community from an unexpected perch, his work embraces the often-unassuming role of the artist as an observer of the human condition. He employs a visual vocabulary charged by the desire for social change and the fostering of greater awareness: “I want people to feel the rage and to fight injustice in today’s crazy world. The drawings are my way of screaming out, hoping to make another person speak out, and then another.”
