BILL JONES a waking dream
1 2 contents
Introduction...... 4
Exhibition Essay...... 5
Cyanotype Series...... 7
Artist Bio...... 15
Video Stills...... 16
Bill Jones & Matthew Brower...... 19
Bill Jones & Stephen Andrews...... 20
Equivalences Series...... 21
Afterimage Magazine Exhibition Review...... 25
Installation Images...... 28
Links...... 30
List of Works...... 31
Exhibition Invitation...... 32
Pamphlet Design by Erin Storus
3 introduction
A primary exhibition for the 2018 ABOUT THE JOHN B. AIRD GALLERY Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival: Organized by and presented The John B. Aird Gallery opened in in partnership with the John B. Aird 1985. It was named in honour of the Gallery, with sponsorship from Akau 23rd Lieutenant Governor of Ontario Framing, Barefoot Wines, Revest As- to recognize his support of the visual set Management and Westbury Na- arts in the province and in Canada. tional Show Systems Ltd. Governed by a Board of Directors, the Gallery’s mandate is to create aware- This exhibition represents the cul- ness and promote the enjoyment of mination of a multimedia project by works of art by professional contem- New York-based artist Bill Jones that porary artists. In order to fulfill its traces the first hundred years of pho- mandate, the Gallery strives to en- tography, from its invention in 1839 courage excellence in visual art; pres- to its modernist triumphs in the early ent a variety of media, disciplines, 20th century. The exhibition inte- and styles; and to provide opportu- grates still and moving imagery and nities for study and education in con- a wide range of media techniques to junction with exhibitions. reinterpret historical works. Looking to the composite images of 19th-cen- tury British photographer Henry Peach Robinson and the sequenced motion studies of Robinson’s contem- porary Eadweard Muybridge, through to the advent of cinema, Jones maps early analogue history onto the con- temporary digital landscape.
4 exhibition essay
By Carla Garnet
Waking Dream is a multimedia proj- in the 1970s, to his later collabora- ect by New York-based artist Bill tive explorations in interactive video. Jones that traces the first hundred His work breathes new life into the years of photography, from its in- history of the photographic medium, vention in 1839 to its modernist tri- bringing forth a sense of freely mov- umphs in the early 20th century. The ing forward and backward through exhibition integrates still and moving time and space. imagery and a wide range of media techniques to reinterpret historical Throughout Waking Dream, the con- works. Looking to the composite sumptive sleeping figure from Rob- images of 19th-century British pho- inson’s composite photo She Never tographer Henry Peach Robinson Told Her Love (1857) repeatedly ap- and the sequenced motion studies of pears. Here she is cast as Hypatia, a Robinson’s contemporary Eadweard pagan woman who was said to have Muybridge, through to the advent of witnessed Christ’s image appear in cinema, Jones maps early analogue a piece of cloth submerged in the history onto the contemporary digital water. For Jones, Hypatia’s miracle landscape. in some ways presages the invention of photography in the late 1830s, The origins of photography and the establishing the medium’s essence evolution of its aesthetic forms has as a metaphysical experience rather informed Jones’ work throughout than as a series of evolving recording his career, from his early years in devices. In Waking Dream, Hypatia California, where he grew up near travels through time and witnesses Muybridge’s photography studio, to the birth of photography and its sub- his involvement with the Vancouver sequent growth. Throughout, she is School of conceptual photography attended by figures animated from
5 The title Waking Dream references elaborate tableaus are techniques the 1993 Metropolitan Museum of paralleled in Jones’ use of sampling Art exhibition ‘The Waking Dream: technology and layered loops in the Photography’s First Century’, curated networked software he has used by Maria Morris Hambourg. For Ham- to produce his work of the last two bourg, the titular turn of phrase is decades. Preliminary experiments suggestive of “the haunting power of in photography have alternately col- photographs to commingle past and lapsed, expanded, and suspended present, to suspend the world and time; the works that comprise Wak- the artist’s experience of it in unique ing Dream take up this thread, un- distillations.” Jones dramatizes this spooling it into the present. commingling of past and present in his installation through the use of ar- C.G. chival materials, animation software and innovative digital techniques. To accompany the visual components of Waking Dream, Jones has written a score based on the 1839 folk song “Kathleen Mavourneen,” which was popular during the American Civil War.
Muybridge’s early stop-motion pho- tography experiments first posited photography as a durational art form and presaged motion picture projec- tion. These explorations are echoed in Jones’ work, which is equally con- cerned with the temporal and incre- mental aspects of images in motion. Further, Muybridge’s post-produc- tion addition of clouds into his land- scapes, and Robinson’s use of multi- ple negatives stitched together into
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 artist bio
BILL JONES is an artist who lives and including a mid-career retrospective, works in Brooklyn, NY. Jones was a Bill Jones: 10 Years of Multiple-Im- seminal figure in the 1970s concep- age Narratives, at the International tual photography scene in Vancouver, Center of Photography; Badischer Canada, along with such artists as Ian Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; Art Wallace, Christos Dikeakos, Jeff Wall Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gal- and Rodney Graham. lery, PS1 Contemporary Art Center; The Brooklyn Museum; The Jewish Jones’s work engages a range of sub- Museum, NY; Rotunda Gallery; San- jects and methodologies from land- dra Gering Gallery, NY; Lombard-Freid scape photography and the interface Fine Arts, NY; Amy Lipton Gallery, NY; of urban, exurban and wilderness White Columns, NY; San Francisco environments to analogue and dig- MOMA; The High Museum, Atlanta; ital photographic experimentation. The Milwaukee Art Center; Musée Over the years Jones has developed a d’Art Moderne, Paris; Kettle’s Yard, number of unique photographic tech- Cambridge, UK. niques including photo assemblages that combine color and black and white photography, cameraless silver prints made with multiple free-stand- ing lenses and the production of dig- ital imagery by playing and capturing video samples with the Vj program modul8.
Jones’ work has been shown widely in the US and internationally,
15 16 17 18 bill jones & matthewbrower lunch & learn
Bill Jones leads a walk-through of his exhibition Waking Dream, in conversation with photo-theorist Dr. Matthew Brower. Their discussion will centre on the photograph- ic aesthetic developed during its first hundred years and the effect it has had on Jones’ life’s work as a visual artist, writer, scientist and inventor.
19 bill jones & stephen andrews in conversation
Bill Jones and Stephen Andrews have been friends and contemporaries for over 20 years. Each have novel approaches to media and mediation in their work and share a love of experimentation. On Saturday afternoon from 1-3, the Aird will present an informal discussion between Jones and Andrews about meaning and metaphor in the information age.
20 21 22 23 24 exhibition review afterimage magazine, 2018
Where do images come from? West- Jones’s exhibition, a summation of his ern art history tells us they come long-term aesthetic and theoretical from male genius. Yet, stories scat- inquiries, developed a conversation tered through ancient mythology that was at once dense and enchant- assign primordial roles for women: ing. Two multimedia projections, ten Pliny the Elder attributed the origin of large cyanotype and digital prints, painting to a young Corinthian wom- and four small vitrines displaying an who traced her lover’s shadow mostly historical photographic tech- before he departed; a pagan woman, nologies and images charted a tangle Hypatia, birthed Christ’s image from of themes that engaged technologi- an amniotic lake, establishing the cal, psychological, metaphysical, first icon from which all following and social relations. icons were copied; Veronica printed Christ’s face on her veil. New York The title of the exhibition recalls the City–based artist Bill Jones considers 1993 Metropolitan Museum of Art such mythical moments as pre-pho- exhibition The Waking Dream: Pho- tographic; these early tracings, direct tography’s First Century, which fea- copies, watery images (as in a dark- tured works made when the untamed room tray) generated a lineage that medium was still dreaming itself, in led directly to modern photography, expressive realms outside of positivist film, and digital media. This lineage— science. Jones sampled heavily from woman imagining and birthing im- that period and, through formal and ages—glows at the heart of Waking thematic mixing, destroyed any mate- Dream. rial and conceptual integrity
25 imposed upon those images by art Waking Dream (2018, 14 min.) un- history. The artist populated his folds as in a dream: a flickering work with figures plucked from that candle flame doubles, as if mirrored canon, reconstituting them to within a dark pool. Keening musical express his own meditations on the strains seem to coax out, as if in a medium. Thematically intertwined developing tray, an image of a wom- are feminine and maternal symbols an, holding a skull and gazing into a of water, ponds, waterfalls, framed mirror—she is Georges de La and the moon; death, since no seri- Tour’s The Penitent Magdalen (1640). ous study of photography In the mirror the face of Julia Jackson, can occur without photography’s par- as photographed by Julia Margaret adoxical pairing of presence and Cameron (1867), slowly emerges; absence; and imaging processes of that Jackson’s daughter, Virginia copying, mirroring, reflection, Woolf, drowned herself adds addi- layering, animation, and easy produc- tional resonance. Light mixed with tion and dissemination. These desire pulls forth its double—that latter processes recover the feminine is what photography does. Another and the democratic character figure, who reappears throughout the of their ancient photographic precur- exhibition, appears in center frame sors. for the duration of the video: hover- ing within black space is Henry Peach Jones, whose eclectic background Robinson’s languishing lady, from his includes conceptual artmaking photograph She Never Told Her Love within the 1970s Vancouver School, (1857). She is recognizable as the cancer research, and live model, in slightly different pose, who animation performance, employed stages her consumptive demise technology from that latter activity in Robinson’s five-negative combina- to produce the two video works here; tion photograph, Fading Away (1858). through animation software, he -an A flow of imagery and sound dances imated and merged still and moving around and behind her delicate fig- images andsound in an evocative ure: Eadweard Muybridge’s images statement about our desire to make mark the when photography breaks images. into a walk, then a run, before
26 bursting into cinema, his dancing In Waking Dream, Jones merges an woman first appearing and then exuberant play with interdisciplinary turning away, figuring Freudian at- media and his long engagement with tachment and loss; his somersault- the photographic medium to devel- ing man—now colorized by Jones as op a quiet conversation across and flesh and rotating in mid-air—is an between media—a murmur beneath amoebic fetus; and his zoöpraxiscope the canon’s masculine bravura. Here, disc spins and spirals in joyful tem- time, contrary to photography’s her- po. Watery scenes are a Gustave le alded ability to stop it, is fluid, mov- Gray seascape and Edward Steichen’s ing freely, backward and forward pond. The music, moving from pretty across space. music box tinkling to mournful lament, reflects the darkness, plea- sure, and joy of imagemaking. JILL GLESSING writes on art, politics, Themes and images reappear and culture and teaches at York and throughout the exhibition: the Ryerson Universities in Toronto. video Fox Talbot’s Pond (2018, 4:51 min.) animates the inventor’s pond photograph with a rising moon re- flected in rippling water; Florence Henri’s modernist mirror play is mirrored again and printed as a cy- anotype (After Florence Henri, from 2017). Jones feminized Alfred Stieg- litz’s canonical cloud series with his digitally printed video captures of the moon and clouds reflected in water (Equivalents, 2017). One vitrine dis- plays a framed photograph of the artist’s mother, revealing his personal engagement with the exhibition’s themes.
27 installation images
28 29 links
Full ‘Equivalent’ series found here: https://bill-jones.net/a-brief-history-exhi- bition/
Full video of conversation with Stephen Andrews found here:https://vimeo. com/269755120
Full video of ‘Waking Dream’ found here: https://vimeo.com/269928143
30 list of works
Page 7: Bill Jones, After Henry Peach-Robinson, 2017, cyanotype, 26 x 30 inches
Page 8: Bill Jones, After György Kepes, 2017, 26 x 30 inches
Page 9: Bill Jones, The Photographer, 2017, cyanotype, 26 x 30 inches
Page 10: Bill Jones, Turning Away, 2017, 26 x 30 inches
Page 11: Bill Jones, After Florence Henri, 2017, cyanotype, 26 x 30 inches
Page 12: Bill Jones, Bauhaus 2 (my Moholy), 2017, 20 x 26 inches
Page 13: Bill Jones, Acrobat,2017, 26x 30 inches
Page 16: Bill Jones, Bill Jones, Waking Dream, 2017, Video Still.
Page 17: Bill Jones, Bill Jones, Waking Dream, 2017, Video Still.
Page 18: Bill Jones, Bill Jones, Waking Dream, 2017, Video Still.
Page 21: Bill Jones, Equivalent # 3, 2016, Iris Print, 30 x 40 inches
Page 22: Bill Jones, Equivalent # 6, 2016, Iris Print, 30 x 40 inches
Page 23: Bill Jones, Equivalent # 7, 2016, Iris Print, 30 x 40 inches
Page 24: Bill Jones, Stereoscope, 2017.
31 32