Speaking of HVCCA, Chris Jones, the museum's current artist in residence will be opening an exhibit of the work created during these past three months he's been in Peekskill. I stopped in two weeks ago to see him and drop off more magazines to feed the furnace of his studio frenzy.
Since my first visit in the beginning of March, Chris' studio has become far more densely packed with materials and it is now dominated by the sizeable works in progress. Chris uses collaged elements from magazines to build a sort of 3D collage. His work has a dualistic nature - visually, and conceptually. Visually, seeing his work feels a little like viewing something through a set of stereoscopic glasses; your field of vision is slightly skewed. Conceptually, that duality plays out in the notion of actuality vs. representation and what is concrete, solid, vs. the ephemeral, non-structural made structural. The glossy pages Chris uses are not simply the surface of the piece they are integral to the structure and form holding his work together, yet the amorphously shifting imagery within the pages that are essentially the building blocks of his structures serve more to dissolve or erradicate the work's representational presence rather than reinforce it.
He manipulates the imagery in the magazines to embody an uncanny presence and form of textures depicted in his source images.
It's trippy stuff. How an appropriately crumpled piece of paper bearing a photographed image can take evoke the immediate and visceral experience of seeing a thing even while you are aware that you are viewing a scaled down, 2D, documentation of that thing.
I'm not going to give away what he's been doing, but he's been doing it feverishly. The work that he's creating now has everything to do with his stay in Peekskill, which is his first time in the States.
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