Interjections

New works by Cassie Jones

Cassie Jones lives in Brunswick, Maine. She received her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her BA from Bowdoin College. Her art has been shown in solo exhibitions at Space Gallery and Coleman Burke Gallery in New York, as well as group exhibitions at Art Chicago, Gallery 808 in Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and others. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony.

Cassie Jones’s three-dimensional paintings feel like memories from the recesses of our prehistoric origins.  Like images arisen from the accumulated millennia of previous biology, they are a material memory of prior cellular incarnations and sensations.

The inset color sequences, inlaid like fossils, or like imprints of light or emotion embedded in our psyches, bring to mind a variety of forms: protozoa, and microscopic activity in larger animals—the movement of cilia, eyelashes, water through gills, wind through fur; thought vibrations of sea horses; a sea-urchin’s dreaming body; the vivid emotions of tiny crustaceans; the re-constitution of dinosaurs; veins of mica inside rocks; the complicated vibrancy of a plant; molting of all kinds; reptile equations; any two beings touching; refracted light from stars; water; the alternation of translucence and opacity of flesh, grass, feathers, and blossoms.

Something like this must be taking place inside of us right now, something that corresponds to many parts of creation; these pieces express the possibilities of sentience.

The color sequences in each piece suggest patterns but do not form actual patterns.  Instead, it is as though each piece is a physical, visible section of something larger, something that forms a pattern too big to see, or outside of our perception.  The sensation is similar to looking at a landscape: we have a limited, heightened view of a complex form.  These pieces often evoke landscapes, some of them familiar: hillsides, the cross section of a rock face, the divisions of a shoreline, but many of them feel as if they are portions of landscapes we recognize from inside ourselves, like the experience of seeing light patterns of phosphenes in motion if we close our eyes and press our hands against them.  These bright movements are a kind of perception, reflecting our internal space and viscosity, and its relationship to the composition of the exterior world.  

These paintings, sculptures, forms—suggest the components inside a hill thinking about the hill, or configurations of fauna and flora whose dreams have entered our blood through the convergence and dissipation of matter.  They are not an imagining of transformation as much as a conception or expression of it; they posit the possibilities of what we retain of matter as it passes through time.  Their texture, as if rocks were pliable, and the intensified stone hues—gray-pink, gray-lavender, one-tone moss—suggest the malleability of the physical world, and how it might yield its mysteries to our perception, and our memories of it.

— Arda Collins