KELLY KRISTIN JONES
Kelly Kristin Jones is a mixed media artist who was born in Chicago and currently lives and works there as well. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and served as the Post-MFA Faculty Photography Fellow at the University of Georgia (2013). Jones is a 2016 finalist for the Artadia (Atlanta) Award and is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellowship Grant (2016), the Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2015), the Southwest Airlines Arts and Social Engagement Prize (2013), MINT Gallery Leap Year Artist Award (2013), the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship (2012), The Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Prize (2011, 2012) and the Municipal Art League Fellowship (2012).
Kelly Kristin Jones’ artwork utilizes urban landscape photographs as a starting point for analysis and confrontation. In exploring landscape as site, condition and genre, Jones cultivates new possibilities for interpretation. Photographs of major cities in the Southern United States are re-formed and each image is given novel dimension and refreshed verve. Jones uses medium and method to challenge the presumed notions of landscape and create new relationships around materials.
Reproduced contemporary and historic images of Southern US cityscapes are printed on new materials and photo-led sculptures are installed to encourage a fresh elucidation. Jones investigates relationships between the urban space and psychic state by creating abstracted and hybrid illuminations of the cityscape's most immediate visual and sensory effects.