Jesse Jones

Image: Still from “The Struggle Against Ourselves,” 2011, 16mm film transferred to video. Courtesy the artist.

Jesse Jones (b. 1978, Dublin) currently lives and works in Dublin, where she received her MA in Visual Arts practices at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in 2005. Her films and videos have been screened and exhibited internationally in such notable exhibitions as the 11th International Istanbul Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Redcat, Los Angeles; Collective, Edinburgh; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; and Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

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?

For PS Jesse will work with Fiona Marron on their collaborative project “In These Trouble times” based on the Brechtian quote from the 1929 opera, “the rise and fall of the city of Mahoganny”. The project emerged as a method to examine the effect of the collapsed Celtic tiger economy on the urban landscape and trace how ideas of optimism and disappointment collide in our conciseness. The project has manifested itself through discursive workshops and film screenings.

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