Corinne Jones

Allegory of the Unnamed Cave

January 11 - March 14  

Within the hard to reach dark- zones in a network of caves in middle Tennessee, there exists elaborate cave art, the oldest dating from around 4,000 BCE. The zones are known as the Unnamed Caves. The caves remain unnamed by archeologists in order to keep the locations secret.

Allegory of the Unnamed Cave is a solo show by Corinne Jones at Tops Gallery. The title of the exhibition reimagines the symbolism in Plato's Allegory of the Cave---  by inverting the ascent to sunlit enlightenment and supplanting it with the historical importance of the subterrestrial. The intention of the artist is to present an homage to the Underground. The word "underground" conjures various histories beginning with the Underground Railroad, followed by WWII Resistance Movements, and resulting in postwar counterculture, characterized by subversive music, literature and film.

The work presented in Allegory of the Unnamed Cave is both a symbolic expression and a proposition based on the question---  what shape could a monument take if it is conceived as a physical space for social connectivity? The answer takes the form of a large-scale painting installation that spans the gallery walls and floors. The paintings delineate seating areas for social interaction. On top of the unstretched paintings, stacks of moving blankets provide seating that can be rearranged as needed. The paintings are dynamic visual fields that resemble wavelengths. The scale relationship between the wavelength motifs and the quilted lines in the moving blankets is one-to-one, a reference to human scale. 

In addition to the main gallery, a text installation is on view at Tops at Madison Avenue Park. The park location is lit up and viewable through a glass wall 24 hours a day. Jones makes use of the accessibility of the space to treat the gallery as an extended marquee. The text work poses a question that addresses our present day social-technological dilemmas: "If mainstream culture comes to us as a hyperreal feedback loop, how do we act to initiate the radical possibilities expressed by way of the underground?"

CORINNE JONES (b.1972 Memphis,TN) Jones lives and works in New York, NY. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2007 and a BFA from The School of Visual Arts in 1996. Jones has realized public art projects at the Elizabeth Street Garden, New York, NY; at Madison Avenue Park, Memphis, TN; and on Huling Street, Memphis, TN. She has exhibited solo and two-person shows at Situations Gallery, New York, NY; Jackie Klempay, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of America books, Brooklyn, NY; Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN, and has participated in various group shows including galleries and museums in Miami, FL; London, UK; and Warsaw, Poland. Her work is held in many private and public institutions including the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She currently teaches at The Cooper Union. Jones has published several editions, "Liam Gillick & Corinne Jones," (Brigade Commerz/Liam Gillick, 2010, "Plain English," 2014, and "Trends in Repurposed Abstraction" which debuted at the MoMA PS1 Art Book Fair in 2015. Her artwork has received critical praise from The New Yorker, Art News, Art Slant, and Artcore journal.