BLUE/LIVES
This summer, resident artist Art Jones works with drawing, photography, moving images, and sculpture for a process-based installation at Soup Gallery. His project blue/lives examines police data alongside mainstream media and independent reports to locate every documented fatal encounter between an unarmed civilian and law enforcement in the United States from January 1, 2018 through the present moment.
The title 'blue/lives' encapsulates a deadly equation. How does the power of blue divided by the number of lost lives reveal the American illusion of security? Can we formulate a new morality to inform alternative applications of state power in relation to people? We must!
Over the coming weeks, 3D prints of topographic maps will line the gallery walls. Each sculpture derives from Google Maps data to represent an area marking the longitude and latitude of an individual's death.
Human figures at 1/64th scale intermingle the terrain, posed and engaged in daily life: waiting for a bus, using the phone, sitting on a bench, and protesting. Combined, these elements present a diorama of normality that we may otherwise understand as tolerated societal dysfunction.
Accompanying video provides a first-person point-of-view that travels alongside, inside, and above a projected virtual landscape. This larger-than-life topography of the dead invites viewers to consider statistics parsed to the square half-meter altogether, in which form they become more than the sum of their data. Digital imaging and GPS confront us with the particulars of lived experience that for so long so many ignored.
Art Jones is a Bronx-born artist who works with photography, moving images, sculpture, and installation. His films, videos, and live media performances often concern the interrelationships between popular culture, collective memory, and power. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally at institutions such as Ars Electronica, MoMA, Tate Gallery, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and LA Freewaves, among others. As a resident at Chinatown Soup, Art is developing a variety of mixed media interfaces to coincide with his performance-based activities.