Jones celebrated his first museum solo show last night when he debuted new ambitious works in his site specific installation Unbound big huge congratulations to Samuel and the great effort that went into this show!
Samuel Levi Jones opens at the Studio Museum in Harlem March 26th with a solo exhibition titled Unbound.
For Unbound, Jones presents four new works that are his largest yet, and utilize law textbooks disassembled into their structural components. Spines and covers form wall-to-wall painting-like works mounted on canvas or adhered directly to the wall (Unbound, Jaded and Don’t Feel Right), and pages are processed and molded into an assemblage (Reformation). In the three wall works, form and materiality are emphasized, while function and value are called into question—the books have been stripped of authoritative identity. These works engage recent criticism of the law and the justice system with respect to human rights and social welfare.
Reformation differs from the other works but displays a similar theme of destruction in service of newly imagined forms. Jones took pages from the books—literally, their content—and processed them in an industrial pulping machine. He then slowly dried the wet, shredded paper mixture in shipping crates, which transformed the pulpy gray matter into a large, solid mass. The weight, illegibility and presence of the installation suggest the metaphorical burden of the law, in which those not educated in legal procedure or jargon must face the impenetrability of the legal system. Jones points out the inaccessibility of some forms of knowledge, and strives to create an inclusive space by rendering indeterminate the authority that such knowledge appears to confer.
Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound is organized by Naima J. Keith, Associate Curator.
Exhibiting artist and ninth recipient of the Alexander Wein Artist Prize Samuel Levi Jones will lead a paper pulping and book(un)binding workshop to illustrate the tactile processes he employs in fabricating works for his site-specific project, Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound. In his practice, Jones reworks diverse source materials—from encyclopedias and law books to technical manuals—and literally deconstructs these widely published arbiters of authenticity to challenge the relevance and accuracy of certain historical records. Through this practice of omission and the fracturing of information, Jones is able to forge a more personal alliance with the materials. In this workshop, Jones will work with program participants to examine their own attachments to materials from their personal archives. No experience is necessary, however, please bring your own selection of paper source materials with you to the workshop.
Helping to facilitate the hands-on portion of this workshop will be a group of students from Urban Studio, a collective of artists based in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Fine Arts Department that creates and nourishes professional development through emphasizing participation and collaboration. The students’ knowledge of book binding and paper making will help explore new layers of Jones’s process. They will also lend their own unique perspectives on the art of the book and introduce alternative techniques for consideration.
RSVP to programs@studiomuseum.org to pre-register.