Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents Directions: Jennie C. Jones: Higher Resonance. On view from May 16 through Oct. 27.
Jennie C. Jones (American, b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1968; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) explores the confluences between abstract visual art and African American avant-garde music in an exhibition of new work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. On view from May 16 through Oct. 27, the site-specific installation melds paintings and sculptures with a sound piece that manipulates elements of works by experimental composers and performers. The combination testifies to Jones’ conception of abstraction as a language that can encompass cultural, political and historical ideas and can work toward spanning the critical gulf between African American and dominant modernisms.
The artist’s first solo museum exhibition, “Directions: Jennie C. Jones: Higher Resonance” is installed on the Hirshhorn’s third level, directly between single-artist galleries devoted to the abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly and Clyfford Still. Jones’ work opens up a conceptual dialogue with the modernist history embodied by these painters and extends it to encompass the music of figures such as Alvin Singleton, Wendell Logan, Olly Wilson, Alice Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose source material she digitally “re-composes” for “Higher Resonance” (2013), the sound work that gives the exhibition its title. With looping, tempo changes and repetition, as well as the addition of silent expanses, Jones reinterprets music she has played in her studio as she works.
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