Hatsubon Photographs
Hatsubon is a memorial exhibition exploring the dynamic tension between tradition and performance through photographs and video, and include portraits of my father in the diaphanous space between life and death. The materiality of the exhibition suggests repeating dualities from the fleeting and the lasting– with floating silk landscapes and solid walnut framed images of the body and its urn, to the ephemeral and the corporeal–with suspended ribs of the skeleton boat and the heft of the hand-carved wooden oar. Relationships between and amongst object, place, and landscape come together in a pendulous state of longing and release. I am continuing to build on this work, and hope to show it further.
Throughout time communities and cultures have sent many of their young ones off to sea to find a better life on the other shore; at the other end of a lifetime, the ocean is home to our many rituals of death, both vehicle and destination for the final journey of our loved ones. With this body of work we travel to Jones’ unnamed coast—where the river meets the sea—to ritually set free the spirit and body of her father, who passed away just days before she arrived in San Francisco as a Visiting Artist and Curator-in-Residence.
Deirdre Visser, Curator of The Arts at CIIS
Hatsubon Installation
Kipp Gallery, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Installed in a gallery close to my father's birthplace, Hatsubon: Passage is a layered three-channel video installation with three significant sites of water: Monongahela River, Pennsylvania; Pacific Coast, California; Big Island, Hawai'i repeated in memorial reflecting pools, a skeleton boat of ribs made of ash wood, and an oar carved of cherry wood after an end-of-life conversation about passage to the other side. Read the story, Bring me the Oar!
Inspired by end-of-life conversations with her father in the months leading up to his death, "Hatsubon: Passage" takes shape as a meditation on spiritual transcendence through photographic installation and video projection.
Chris McGinnis, Curator, Kipp Gallery
Waterlines collaboration with Jonathan Marquis
Water is a tangled history. After more than five years of severe drought in California, this year’s winter storms brought an incredible amount of rain and snowfall. Come spring, the unprecedented precipitation brought relief to the drought stricken region, but along with the water came a new set of concerns: floods, infrastructure damage, cracking dams, and overflowing reservoirs. Waterlines is a response to the urgencies of water in the age of extreme weather and climate change. How do shifts in weather and the fluctuation of scarcity to abundance shape the climate of behavior? When and where does it become personal? A series of cyanotypes, created on-site in an intensive two-week collaboration in Northern California with painter Jonathan Marquis, thread together a correspondence of water and human activity. The immediacy of the cyanotype engages both photography and painting, presenting an appropriate medium to collaborate and examine the issue of water.
Canal, environmental installation, Scottsdale Public Art
Environmental site-responsive installation with three-channel video, single-channel audio for Scottsdale Public Art. Located on the Arizona Canal, the drinking water supply for the larger Phoenix metropolitan area and assisted by the Salt River Project. Scottsdale, Arizona.
Rattlesnake Lake, platinotypes
A lone figure moves through a place of layered, untold histories. I collected lake water to clear the film, as an invitation of the lake to merge physically into the image. Rattlesnake Lake explores a watershed through the view camera, and is presented as platinotypes–a nineteenth century recipe of platinum and palladium handcoated on paper and exposed to ultraviolet light.
It's Beginning to Look Alot Like Christmas, multimedia installation, collaboration with Chris Dacre
Two channel video, three-channel audio installation. Nine modified surplus military parachutes, kinetic toy airplanes and paratrooper, repurposed walmart™ Christmas tree, found holiday card dated 1969, 24k gold-plated tank and many gifts. Grunwald Gallery, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. In collaboration with Chris Dacre.
