“Enter if you dare” reads the sign on the door into Luke Jones’ exhibition at Public Works Art Center (PWAC) in Summerville. In the small, black gallery space, once the vault of the former post office building which PWAC now calls home, Jones shows an exhibition through Nov. 11 called Strange Paradise.
In Jones’ exhibition, monsters in the dark are brought to light. Fragments of Jones’ identity — as an individual, as an American, as an artist — are splayed out and investigated. Dreams and memories serve as the primary reference material in his work, especially those from childhood. For Jones, the way those memories, and the person who remembers them, change over time is endlessly interesting to explore.
The works in this exhibition were created over a number of years. Jones started many during the collectively isolating period of the 2020 Covid-induced lockdown, with others dating back to 2018, when Jones had moved to Charleston from his native Pennsylvania with a partner. When they broke up just before the lockdown, he found himself suddenly alone in a strange new place.
“Before this work, so much of my inspiration was coming from the exterior world. I was always doing portraits of friends, of people I meet,” Jones said.
In a portrait called “Ted”, for example, Jones adds text across the illustrated figure’s protruding forehead. The words are taken from a voicemail which the real-life Ted left for Jones: “I’ll do something violent if I can do it heartily unto the Lord.”
With one brown, realistically human eye and one unpainted clay eye, the work is a portrait of a man. But it’s a self-portrait, too: of Jones’ memory and understanding of Ted, pitched somewhere between amusement and worried compassion.
“This transition happened in the work when I had moved to Charleston, and I had just gone through this breakup,” Jones said. “I didn’t really know many people. I was very isolated, and so I started to look inside for inspiration, looking deeper and deeper.”
One of the largest works in the show, “Emotional Anatomy” gives the viewer a hint on how they might think about Jones’ work: Red and white eyes and mouths with scattered teeth take over the subject’s head, imploring the viewer to consider the many pieces of their identity: One’s identity is constantly changing, Jones reminds us, influencing our understanding of the world and the people around us.
A long-haired character appears in multiple works — in the blue painting “Cutie Patootie,” she is a Madonna figure with spikes around her face. She might be understood as a fragmented and dissected piece of Jones’ broken heart — an expression existing somewhere between love and hate.
Painting from dreams
Jones’ paintings in Strange Paradise are thickly layered and embedded with many different materials; no household item is safe from potentially becoming transformed into art in Jones’ practice. He combines traditional art materials — oil paint, clay, canvas — with melted plasticware, cotton and even a machete in one exhilarating image of a “star child.”
“I’ll go into my kitchen and start taking any plastic plates and cups and melting it,” said Jones, who prefers to work at home. “And before I know it, I don’t have any silverware because I’ve used everything in a painting.
“Whatever is going on in my life, these objects, they can come apart from the art. We go through things so quickly — I like being able to take it and make it this permanent fixture. Almost like a diary, I can look back and see: Here’s this thing I had from this time in my life, and now it’s permanently glued into a painting.”
Working from his home studio is important to him — it means immediate response to spontaneous inspiration.
“I wake up; I’ll start painting. I come home from work; I’ll start painting. I hang out at night; I’m painting. I like having a setup that’s always there. I could wake up from a dream, and that dream goes right into the painting.”
Jones’ paintings often feature deep, black backgrounds which seem to recess into an infinite void. These black paintings call to mind a quote by filmmaker David Lynch: “Black has depth, you can go into it. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”
Like Lynch, Jones deals with the red fireants crawling underneath the white picket fences of American dreams. He wonders where the monster under the bed from childhood goes when we grow up. This is the juxtaposition at the heart of his work: the absurd and the familiar, reality and surreality, fear and love.
Jones’ material choices underscore those themes, especially in the way he activates them: building thick, layered surfaces to talk about the complicated layers of consciousness, the way we hide, edit and present ourselves to the world — or his use of non-archival materials which will change the work over time.
“[I’m inspired by the idea that] a painting can have a lifespan. I know some of the elements are going to change. I’m thinking about memories, especially how we as people age, or go through different phases of life, and so I like that there’s going to be this physical quality of change happening in some of the pieces.
“In making this work, I was finding and discovering this world inside of myself that was this dark and scary place, and dealing with that. I’ve never looked at myself that closely, and so it was strange. But then it kind of became this like paradise, this beautiful inner world. My hope is that when the viewer sees it, they can connect with something in themselves.”
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