Jesse Jones

b. 1978. Lives and works in Dublin. Jesse Jones creates works that primarily take the form of film and video and explores historical instances of communal culture and resistance. Her practice uses drive-in cinemas, film, music and performance in order to explore popular culture as a site of shared collective social consciousness. She has had solo presentations at REDCAT, Los Angeles, and projects at The New Museum, New York and Serpentine Cinema, London, to name a few.

The Spectre and the Sphere, 2008
16mm film transferred to video, 12 min. 21 sec.
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Courtesy the artist
Jesse Jones’ 16mm film The Spectre and the Sphere evokes the spectres of ideology and amplifies residual voices that haunt the cultural vessels of history. It examines how the spaces of our popular imagining, such as the theater and the cinema, are also containers of historical and political impulses. The Spectre and the Sphere conjures up a particular moment in the early twentieth century through the use of cultural artifacts, imagining the various historical potentialities of the time and how this residue may be present in our construction of the future.
The film features a performance by Lydia Kavina, the celebrated musical prot?g?e and great niece of the inventor Leon Theremin, who is the first and only persona character in The Spectre and the Sphere. Opening against a backdrop of theater, the improvising musician performs for a brief period a haunting refrain from the socialist and communist people’s anthem, The Internationale, capturing for a moment the web of relations and references that have woven this particular fabric of history. [Jesse Jones]
The Predicament of Man, 2010
16mm film with digital stills, 3 min.
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Courtesy the artist
Using footage shot in an opal mine in Cobber Pedy, Australia, intercut with over a thousand still images that appear momentarily on screen, Jones subliminally contrasts the desolate landscape with flashes of often recognizable 20th and 21st century icons and events. The Predicament of Man creates an uneasy and foreboding slippage in time that hints at an apocalyptic future. Its title is borrowed from an essay in Limits to Growth by the economic think tank The Club of Rome in 1972. The Predicament of Man examines the consequences of exponential growth theories of late capitalism and how they may not only overstretch our resource carrying capacities, but also our sensory capacity to perceive reality itself. [Jesse Jones]