Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by UK based artist Poppy Jones, titled Cutting Shade.  This will be the artist’s US debut, as well as her first engagement with Mrs., hosted by OCHI Aux in Los Angeles, California.

The exposition, the confrontation, then the denouement. Classic story structure – three acts that begin with the introduction of place, characters and mood, followed by a confrontation, a problem to be tackled, then the resolution, just as everything seems to be unravelling. Without portraying events, and rarely even characters, Jones’ paintings nonetheless have the feeling of chapters, of a narration being told, some even depicting book covers. In Cutting Shade, the walls are scattered with traces of Jones’ surroundings in rural Sussex – props, it feels, in an unfolding drama.

Act one, the exposition. After years of experimenting with different methods of printmaking, Jones realized her eye was often more drawn to the unintended moments of the process – a faint fingerprint mark, or accidental smearing of ink – haptic mishaps, rather than the supposed subject. She’d admire German artist Andrea Büttner’s iPhone etchings – made of daubs from her fingerprints on a smartphone, scaled up to look like gestural paintings. Jones wanted her prints to achieve a similar soiled and self-referential quality. She settled for a specific lithographic experiment: printing a photograph to scale onto a polyester plate coated in water and oil, which she manipulates with watercolor. She realized the materials underneath had to have a mercurial quality, too, mastering a technique by working on to suede and silk, often hoarding scraps from ebay, or cutting up old jackets. The fabrics absorb oil and paint in different ways: the delicate silk soaks them up, bleeding the color deep into its fibers – the tough suede made for blotchy stains, yet is sensitive to the lightest of fingerprints.

The confrontation, act two. What are these things, which she dubs as ‘objects’? Each teeters between printing, painting and photography. Human representation is absent, yet humanity is present, with faint impressions left behind. Her fingerprints fox the suede surfaces – remnants of deliberating and handlings in the studio. She’ll make countless decisions, reaching down further into her overflowing box of offcuts: some that are dyed, others left bare, their history never entirely obliterated. Her approach to subject is equally as complex, infusing familiar sights from her home in unfamiliar close-up: a half-empty glass, burning candles, shadows from a window. She takes quick snapshots when a vision blooms, cogitating over perspectives and crops before transferring one on to plate. In On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status as found objects.” Jones’ ‘objects’ each retain the patina of being held or discovered from a different era. They quickly capture a fleeting moment, but hers unashamedly linger on a feeling – her three melting candles, or half-opened blinds, for instance, both metaphors for time passing. 

Cutting Shade is derived from a verse in Gertrude Stein’s book of poems, Tender Buttons. Stein used the expression to describe layers of pastry, but to Jones it sparked a similarity with her process, ’shadowing’ being to mimic reality, as a shadow does. Once composed, stretched and framed in panes no bigger than the page of a book, Jones’ denouement is hanging them on the wall for the viewer to begin the story. And so it goes round, in the telling and retelling, each piece a fragment of a passing day, like words briefly fixed to a page.

-Ted Targett

Poppy Jones lives and works in Bexhill-on-Sea, UK and holds an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art. Jones has shown work in recent solo and group shows at South Parade, The Artists Room, and What's up, curated by Lawrence Van Hagen, in London, UK, and at Linseed Projects in Shanghai, China. Recent residencies include the KK Museum in Denmark, West Dean in Sussex, UK, and the Horniman Museum Library in London, UK. Her work has been awarded by the Arts Council, the Alf Dunn Award, The Lynn Painters Stainers Young Artist Award and Falmouth Universities Graduate Pre-incubation award.

OCHI is a contemporary art gallery that represents a diverse roster of interdisciplinary artists, programming seamlessly between locations in Sun Valley, Idaho, Los Angeles, California, and abroad. OCHI supports and contextualizes artists with experimental and emerging practices as they investigate the conceptual and material boundaries of art. OCHI is comprised of three spaces: the original gallery has been in Idaho since the 1970s, Ochi Projects was founded in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2015, and OCHI Aux opened in the same building in October 2021. A remarkable moment in OCHI’s unique history, OCHI Aux offers select galleries an opportunity to mount exhibitions and participate in the city’s rich cultural landscape collaborative support, alongside OCHI programming.

OCHI is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance, Gallery Association of Los Angeles, and the Gallery Climate Coalition.