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
Loose narratives unfold in sculptural video installations and questionably fictional photographs. Tomiko Jones' work is linked to place, exploring transitions in the landscape in social, cultural and geographical terms. Jones received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson.
She is the recipient of awards including the 2013 En Foco New Works Fellowship (New York), 4Culture and CityArtists (Seattle), and Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes (France). Recent projects include Hatsubon, a two volume project in photography and video installation; the long-term project Rattlesnake Lake; and the immersive theatre performance The Gretel Project, a four-person collaboration. Tomiko spent three months in residence at Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, France, and in Cassis, France for a project-specific Fellowship at The Camargo Foundation.
Currently Jones is an Assistant Professor of Art at University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an educator she was a 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.
360º in the K'au Desert