Foxy Production announces “D.I.Why?”, the ground-breaking inaugural solo exhibition of BEN JONES, a member of the renowned three-person art collective, Paper Rad. Jones combines painting, drawing, sculpture and video to collide the mass produced with the hand-made within vivid constructions of fantasy landscapes. He imaginatively and enigmatically grapples with the pleasure and complexity of the programmed on one hand, and with the aura of originality and creativity of the handcrafted on the other.
Jones mines an eclectic cultural vein by mixing with bravura a range of techniques and elements. While recalling Keith Haring’s deceptively spare street-Pop sensibility, Jones’ work stakes new ground with its combination of color fields, seas of cartoon-like characters, otherworldly environments, and what he describes as “meta-graffiti.”
“Supercells” – nine paintings on Plexiglass exhibited with the sheen of their surfaces facing out – forms a dynamic panorama comprising individual works of differing mood and structure. In a series of canvases titled “Dog Face”, Jones furthers his exploration of authorship and its commodification: Dog Face is featured as both a visual character and a self-effacing tag or logo. With acrylic and spraypaint, Jones playfully weaves image, text and a fragmentary architectural field to produce vibrant and layered paintings.
Rendered with gouache, spray-paint and pencil, Jones presents expressive and witty works on paper. He has produced both sparse, elegant, iconic images and intricate portrayals of complex narratives: a pink and purple VHS tape floats on the page as does a retro keyboard; “Mystery Mountain” depicts a busy scene of odd characters engaged in a range of curious activities around a craggy peak.
The dog-like “Kay Nine” appears as a bold, flat paneled sculptural figure. It sits, watching a video animation of itself moving through repeating, otherworldly architectural spaces reminiscent of the sheer linear structuring of early computer drawing programs. Jones also presents the video “Face Maker”, a brilliantly colored animation of multiple character portraits; and the trippy “Tragic Carpet Ride”, where a strangely comic being floats through an intensely blue sky on a multicolored carpet.