KATE BECK :: ART NOTES: A Conversation I Want to Have

Cassie Jones When and Between 2010 Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 12x10x5 inches

Cassie Jones makes flat paintings on plastic and low-relief paintings on upholstered panels within a vocabulary of line, shape, color and paradoxical tension. I want to call them all drawings.

Cassie Jones Figure 1a 2004, Alkyd on Acrylite 18x24 inches

Her work takes formal components and serves them up in a way that allows “...mutations, hybrids, and synthetic forms to take shape...”

Cassie Jones Receiver 2010 Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 13x10x4 inches

Line becomes a kind of pictorial register of movement and action. Form becomes gesture. A dialogue emerges, tempered with a twist of spontaneity and off-the-grid humor. It is a conversation I want to have...

Cassie Jones Rook 2009, Acrylic on Duralar, 11x11 inches

Very complex emotions can be evoked from the simplest forms and gesture; the idea of recognizable colors and shapes pulsating amongst irrational thought and feeling.

Cassie Jones Spine 2005 Acrylic on Duralar 17x14 inches

When an artist transforms recognizable materials into artworks, human consciousness intrinsically pervades the viewer's mind. Eye sight is biased by all of the histories, thoughts, associations we may bring to the moment.

Cassie Jones Roll 2006, Acrylic on Duralar 17x14 inches

This is the nature of painting, the subliminal undercurrent that stokes action in the studio, and relinquishes our grasp upon release.

Cassie Jones Second Split 2009, Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 12x10x3 inches

"..There are still lots of surprises along the way and the pieces always diverge from my initial imaginings, but the process of realizing the piece is very different from the spontaneity of the works on paper, " says Jones.

"....I knew I wanted the works on paper to be in dialogue with the larger, low-relief paintings," she said. "Because while they are disparate bodies of work in some ways, they both begin with intuitive responses to my materials and hopefully arrive at a place where the contradictions in the work are posed like questions, not to be resolved, but to be explored."

Cassie Jones Figure 2b 2004, Alkyd on Acrylite, 18x24 inches

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 in 2001. Her work 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.