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In this episode of Boing Boing Video, we visit the Ojai studio of artist Cassandra C. Jones, whose “Google-found” digital photo collages and video loops explore how we “create, communicate with, and consume photography in today’s ‘remix culture.'” San Francisco gallery Baer Ridgway is hosting a solo exhibition of her work, titled “Send Me A Link,” August 1st – September 5th 2009.
Some of the works included are constructed by compiling hundreds of professional and amateur snapshots of the same subject taken by different people. Ranging from full-color lightning bolts to old black and whites of horses jumping over a fence, she links them in ways that depict motion, line and non-linear narrative. Other pieces are made by deconstructing single photographs, removing their backgrounds and reducing them to isolated shapes. Jones then duplicates and arranges these forms to create compositions where singularity and multiplicity exist simultaneously. There is both an order and a chaos present in the body of work, which overall asks the question, what does it mean to organize and interpret imagery in the digital realm, where the archives of visual information are in a constant state of growth and evolution?
More images after the jump, and you may also want to read this article about her work today in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Send Me a Link is at once a nod to the digital landscape in which we find ourselves, and a plea, perhaps an imperative, to create context amidst an endless expanse of images. The phrase explicitly signals the centrality for Jones of network- or systems-oriented digital technologies in the appropriation, accumulation, and manipulation of photographs; the artist culls many of her images from stock or professional photo agencies with an ease and speed unique to our lived moment. Similarly, the wide ranging content of the artist’s most recent compositions (leaping animals, looping roller coasters, hovering athletes) all share a suspended quality, suggesting that approaches to flight, air, falling, or hovering might form a new common thematic concern in Jones’ evolving practice. She has pushed the suggestion even further in recent compositions: by manipulating streaks of lightning across the night sky into explicitly figurative shapes (Lightning Drawing Series, 2009), she offers another link: the aligning of the practices of drawing and photography.”
-James Merle Thomas