Jesse Jones

Jesse Jones's practice focuses on the embedded political and social history within everyday life. She is interested in the moments when this hidden history comes to the surface, such as the demonstration or strike, and in moments of convergence. Seeing popular culture as an expression of this collective narrative of history, her work often adopts elements such as the B movie or pop music as a site of shared memory. Jones also uses the process of restaging a sense of history within contemporary contexts. By reinterpreting these artefacts, Jones scrambles their initial cultural reference and meaning. Can a drive in cinema become a site for films that had been blacklisted in the 50's? Can a social housing project become the site for a symphonic suite? Or a pedestrian bridge the stage for an opera? Or a desert for the staging of a Brecht play?

Recent exhibitions The 11th International Istanbul Biennial | Closed forever, Auto Italia, london 2009 | Red Thread, Tanas, Berlin 2009 , I Have Doubts, Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest, Romania | Group Show, Ubersong, Plan 9, Bristol, UK ( March 2009) | RedRua, Tallaght, Co Dublin (2008) | Historians of the Presents 2, Ghost of Buildings, Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva (November 2009) | Nought to Sixty, ICA, London (June 2008), Project | Performance, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, (June 2008), The Spectre and the Sphere (solo show) Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (September 2008) | 2:MOVE, Belfast Exposed, Belfast; Art In The Life World, Ballymun, Dublin. Previous projects include 12 Angry Films (2006), a public art project, in which Jones worked with an elective community of participants contacted through community networks, trade unions and activist groups, consisting of 9-month collaborative process of film screenings, drama workshops and film making, resulting in a temporary drive-in cinema and radio station in Dublin's docklands.

Jesse Jones completed an International Artist Residency in Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia, June/July 2009 and is currently resident in New York as part of the Location One Fellowship.