Sara Jones

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.sara-jones.com

City / State: South Orange, NJ

I am fascinated by the way physical and emotional disasters can harness the power of cast-off objects and rearrange familiar elements into visually arresting tableaux—making the familiar unfamiliar, something recognizable abstract, and that which was “heimlich” “unheimlich.” These conceptual binaries drive my thought processes, and come through metaphorically in the work as an investigation of the interplay of surface and object. The image dissolves, but in the process its raw physicality emerges. It is an inverted de-materialization—the image (carpet as carpet) gives way to an abstraction that is more tangibly real (the material thread). I physically manipulate my surfaces by incorporating thread and yarn woven through drilled holes, juxtaposing embroidered layers with painted ones, and enveloping entire canvases. The painted line transforms into the actual. Possessed of a physical dimension, line is unbound from the fictional space of the painting’s surface and enters the real space of the viewer. There is a binary between realistic representational systems and pure materiality, the imaginary space of the painting and the actual space of the viewer.