Sarah Jones

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present the second solo show in New York of British artist Sarah Jones. This exhibition will present new work; large scale color photographs that portray solitary figures in the landscape and in emptied out interiors alongside still lives.

These charged photographs appear to depict a luminous world of dis-quieting formal ritual and visual beauty. By working with a continuous new cast of people and moving through generically similar urban public locations; The Nature Park, to the most intimate of private spaces; The Bedroom, the artist brings a serialized novelistic dimension made out of encounters that are at once real and precisely imagined. "Places and gestures are visited and re-visited as though to push beyond the frame of the single moment and reveal something that might be just under the skin or difficult to speak about. One scene sets up a dialogue with another in an endless circular narrative."

The mannerist appearance of these photographs belies their foundations in the real and distances the viewer from any absorbing dramatic experience of the image. The rigor of the language of gesture, detail and formal composition that Jones has developed throughout her work, instead draws us into a natural world where everything or everyone stands in as representative. Each view presents itself as a frozen painterly scene or cinematic still, a truth or an episode among myriads where the surroundings are fused with protagonist. Jones affords each element in the photograph the same weight. A tree, a bed, a darkened sky are each as ‘filled up’ as the person, when figured in the image, who seems to be both under direction and immersed in their own private world.