OPEN STUDIO: ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
OCT 5 to NOV 9, 2021
ABOUT THE ARTIST / THEA JONES
Thea is a video and textile artist living in Hamilton Ontario with her family. Over the five weeks of her residency with Struts Gallery she will be working from a shared studio space called Threshold in Hamilton. Thea will be focusing on a new body of work that has been waiting for her attention for six years. From 2014-2016 Thea was documenting her experience with breast cancer.
"Now six years and a baby later, I feel I have gained enough distance and perspective to be able to contextualize, present and rework these raw images, videos and writings into the beginning of a new (literal) body (of work)."
If you would like to contact Thea, please e-mail Struts at admin@strutsgallery.ca, and we will connect you.
HAIR /
These are remnants, pieces. They mark time's leftovers or leftovers from time. They are no longer me or are as much of me as yesterday was a time I existed in but am no longer there.
Shaving my head multiple times after Cancer softens the details of the trauma in illness. Or softens the details of trauma that remain in those braids. This work, these pieces have been waiting for me. Waiting for me to pull them together. But it needed Yesterday's shave with Simone to bring the time span of the work to a close. If I show (or exhibit) this work I will consider shaving again and calling that collection Today, pulling the pieces forward with me while always closing the loop: Cancer, Pandemic, Yesterday and Today.
For now though this work is complete.
UNTITLED /
Untitled uses an old and familiar trick, that you might have played as a kid, where you wrap your arms around yourself and from the back it looks like someone else is hugging you. Loving you. Kissing you. I wanted to see what it would look like and feel like to watch myself trick myself through the camera lens. Could I still be lured into the trick? And if so, could I experience something beyond the trick as I watch myself be loved, kissed and hugged by me?
I seem to be interested in layering perceptions. In my last update (HAIR) there was an image featuring literal layers of time, marked by my bits and pieces--my remnants. This video, for me, depicts more layers of perception, pointing at something meaningful through trickery and playback.
Note: Untitled is the first in a series of videos I am working on during my residency. This video is a study, the ideas within it are being worked through in real time.