On the Photography of Corinne Jones

Modern two-dimensional collage first appeared in women's scrap books of the later 1800s during an era of affordable photography, increased leisure time, and the availability of disposable print culture-a fortuitous meeting of the burgeoning publishing industry with the stationary store. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's modest but important 2010 exhibition Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage demonstrated that the recycling of mechanical reproductions began not with cubist experiments of gluing extractions of the real world onto paper, but in the mischievous and uncanny amusements of women with both time and scissors at hand. Since this use of craft originated outside the artist's studio without the associated manual skills, collage/assemblage remains a less gendered medium taken up by reclusive occultists (as exemplified by Joseph Cornell), outsiders wanting in (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns) and furtive adolescents (any kid's bedroom wall, locker interior, or backpack). Collage often looks the way music sounds. Klaus Voormann's cover of The Beatles “Revolver” correctly advertised the music within as did, a decade or so later, Jamie Reid's mismatched lettering and ravaged appropriations that mimicked the destabilizing energy of the Sex Pistols, grabbing one's attention with the urgency of a ransom note. Corinne Jones's work in media includes sound recording, and since I believe that everything an artist does affects everything that artist makes, I cannot disconnect her recent collages from her deep engagement with music of a wide spectrum. Even on the page, her pictures lure and promptly abandon us on a hectic but legible field of multiple directives and textural expanse that could be read as geological. They are not “easy on the eye”; early criticism of Pixar's Toy Story series mourned the gaze's “lack of refuge” in all things computer animated, with the pixel-driven image offering little beyond exactitude and constant stimuli in our sustai