JAVA JONES
Java Jones (b. Selma, AL.) is an anti-disciplinary artist engaging with environmentally sensitive and sustainable approaches to sculpture as well as experimental image making. Jones describes their process as an act of feeling and imagining innerwise, oscillating between figuration and abstraction. ‘Inner-’ here refers to irreducible spaces necessary for refusing, for living, for imagining beyond–tilling an autobiographical ground for discursive reflections and formations. The artist’s practice explores quiet photography and haptic memory, critical love and home buildin’, assemblage and nigga riggin’, and abstraction and the burden of identity. Currently, Jones is working on their forthcoming monograph, “on the edge of a dream: one last dance with/in flesh.”
Jones has exhibited work at Artsy (2020), HAIR + NAILS (2020), Superposition Gallery (2020), The Watermill Center (2019), and Aperture Foundation (2018). Jones was a curatorial fellow at EFA Project Space (2019), and the inaugural recipient of Parsons’ Oscar Kolin Fellowship (2019-20).
JAVA’S LIST
TEXTS
Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980 (2006) [exhibition catalogue]
The Howardena Pindell Papers
Typhoon Coming on (2018) [exhibition catalogue]
Mathematics Black Life (2014) by Katherine McKittrick
“Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out of Nowhere” (2016) by David Murillo III
Scenes of Subjection (1997) by Saadiyah Hartman
Poetics of Relation (1990), Édouard Glissant
“Digital Epidermalization” by Simone Browne
Listening to Images (2017), Tina Campt
“Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory” (2009) by Leigh Raiford
FILMS
Tongues Untied (1989) by Marlon Riggs
Personal Problems (1980), Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed
