Mary Jones: Layered histories

Contributed by Katy Crowe / “Significant Properties,” the title of Mary Jones’s current exhibition at as-is.la and her first in Los Angeles in some years, aptly suggests real estate worth seeing. Los Angeles is rich in such properties, and the cinematic allusions in her paintings are also broadly resonant of Tinsel Town, where Jones lived, worked, and showed before she moved to New York. Her new work sprang from images found in a book on French interior design that Jones began painting over with sumi ink. This succinct show consists of four large-scale paintings and one small one, installed in tight proximity that facilitates an intense dialogue among the works. The figure often inhabits an interior in which Jones has interposed expressive gestures in oil paint or superimposed drawings. 

The provocatively titled American Interior is red, black and white, and reminiscent of early Soviet propaganda posters, which were often composed of fragments of photographs and graphics. The collaged layer of the black and red swipes of oil paint has been cut into shapes that follow the brushstrokes and swirl over two different interiors. Two busts sit in oculus windows overlooking this visual cacophony. Most of the compositional work was done before the image was scanned and printed, so Jones’s interventions are admirably seamless.

Neutra Vista reads like a scene from Alain Resnais’ dreamlike film Last Year in Marienbad, but staged here in Los Angeles where most of Richard Neutra’s architectural work is found. Engulfing the simple, grainy modernist set-piece of a solitary figure reclining by a swimming pool is a darkly apocalyptic backdrop of looming desert mountains. Pool of the Poet, its title borrowed from Jean Cocteau’s film, tracks as a surrealist happening. The pool is now indoors, resembling a turn-of-the-century bath. Cerulean blue evokes water, oxide pink flesh and humidity, with the Cocteau drawing of nude entwined figures superimposed making for a steamy compressed environment. 

Jones’s titles can’t help but inform how one sees the paintings. Le Weekend Cocteau conjures a wild orgiastic party in an inscrutable space filled with bodies, mystical symbolic forms, and uncomfortable furniture. French Thicket moves outdoors again and conflates three different exteriors collaged together with an interior that seems to emerge from the middle in a snowsquall of washy white paint.

Despite their fin-de-siècle interiors and references to the art and film of the last century, these works feel fresh and smart, somehow leaping into the future. Jones’s imaginative juxtaposition of images with a limited palette allows the black-and-white of the photos to unify the surfaces, lending a grandness to the fractured spaces. The technique reflects her skill, intelligence, and wit, infusing jangled, moody narratives with irreverent energy.

“Mary Jones: Significant Properties,” as-is.la, 1133 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. Through February 17, 2024

About the author: Katy Crowe is a Los Angeles-based painter, working in oil and watercolor.