Statement
Almost every summer, my father would pile us into the car and take us to explore the treasures of the nation, our public lands. In the most classic of touristic gestures we would set forth in a camper. We visited “feats of human engineering” – dams, bridges and buildings were favorite stops on our way to admire “feats of nature” such as Yellowstone and Niagara Falls. Many miles of open land lay between our destinations, and watching the American landscape pass by had a profound effect on me over the years. I would want to stop and explore, but it seemed like there was never enough time. This created in me a longing to return.

The overarching element throughout my work is a relationship to place, a loose mapping of landscape. Exploring the geography of changing landscapes, I search for places I can feel a sense of communication. I often work at dusk, when color bleeds from the sky and the sublime reveals itself. As the light of day dims, time and movement become an integral part of the photographic process. I find quiet, yet significant moments in the transitional place between land and water, destruction and reclamation, thought and action. Site-responsive installations are an investigation of landscape. I invite images, video, light, audio, objects and performance–sometimes as an intervention, at others as if in conversation.

I come back to the early days of longing for the landscape and a desire to connect to something so abstract I could not name it. As I move from place to place, I am reminded of Rebecca Solnit, in her paraphrasing of Edmund Husserl’s description of walking as experience, “it is the body that moves but the world that changes, which is how one distinguishes the one from the other: travel can be a way to experience this continuity of self amid the flux of the world...”[1]

[1] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), 27.

Biography
Tomiko Jones’ photography and multidisciplinary installations explore social, cultural and geopolitical transitions, considering the twin crises of too much and too little in the age of climate change. Loose narratives unfold in sculptural video installations and questionably fictional photographs.

Jones received the Grand Challenge Seed Grant from the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education (2019-2022) for These Grand Places, a photographic project on public land. She is the recipient of awards including the En Foco New Works Fellowship (New York, 2014), 4Culture and City Artists (Seattle, 2010), and Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes (France, 2008). She was an invited resident artist at Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, France (2008), and selected for a project-specific Fellowship at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2009). She has received recognition for her photographic works by Analog Sparks (2023) and Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass Top 200 (2022).

Jones received her MFA and Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona, Tucson, where she studied with Professors Sama Alshaibi and Frank Gohlke. She is Associate Professor of Art at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vilas Professorship, Early-Career Investigator Award (2024-27). She has held several teaching appointments including Visiting Artist and Curator-in-Residence at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Assistant Professor and Photography Program Coordinator at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mendocino College, New Mexico State University and Drury University Summer Institute for Visual Arts.