Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in May 2024
British Painter and Visual Artist Rachel Jones Will Debut “!!!!!” at the MoAD
The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) presents “!!!!!”, artist Rachel Jones’ first museum solo exhibition in the United States. Located in the museum’s third-floor galleries, the exhibition is curated by Erin Genoa Gilbert and expands on the artist’s use of mouths and teeth to symbolize encounters between Black interiority and outward expression. The new works expand on the painter’s gesture as its own communicative medium, with raw untouched linen providing negative spaces in her phantasmic geography of inner landscapes.
Twelve New Paintings
“!!!!!” represents the artist’s evolution over the past few years. Jones is influenced by the poetry and prose of Black writers, and probes the limitations of language. The mouth speaks in prayer and protest. The mouth forms words that can bring into being a new and improved reality. Curator Erin Jenoa Gilbert said “I’ve witnessed her mesmerizing compositions enforce the idea that at a cellular level, the mouth is central to our comprehension of human emotion. For people throughout the African diaspora, it is a site in which decipherable and indecipherable experiences are transformed through poetic intonation and incantation. Rachel’s practice forcefully contends with the history of painting, transcending categories as her work oscillates between abstraction and figuration.”
Six large-scale paintings on linen created between 2023 and 2024 will be accompanied by six smaller works on canvas, each titled “!!!!!”. The large-scale works on linen employ the artist’s familiar mouth and teeth motifs which take up the entire painting, aiming toward a monstrous and comical effect. In this exhibition, Loony Tunes imagery is used as a reference paralleling the real and fictional environments.
The Cartography of Internal Worlds
Internal worlds are depicted through swirling washes of paint in and around the open mouths. Jones uses the mouth as a glyph or icon, becoming a vessel to explore Black expression and world building. The show’s title, pronounced as “Five Exclamation Points”, gestures toward the gap between symbols and what they seek to describe. The word is a symbol existing where thought meets expression, and the mouth becomes the place where that combustion of invention resides. The internal becomes external in the figuration of the open mouth.
There’s a vitality of color and form that connects all of Rachel Jones’ paintings. Sound, noise and speech are also influenced by teeth, sometimes conventionally-shaped but rendered comically to spark intrigue and curiosity. Mouths in Jones’ work represent points of sound, but also the projections of inner life. Cross hatchings of bright color along the canvas seem pastoral, an expanse of space connecting swirling colors of building blocks mimicking teeth. The mouth prepares and lays down the foundation of communication with these stacked blocks. It mimics construction. These are working landscapes emerging from the exposed linen as if an idea was captured, caught mid-sentence.
Speaking Through Abstraction
Rachel Jones completed her BA Fine art at Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and an NMA Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2019. She is internationally-renowned for her large-scale abstract paintings which are housed in prominent institutional collections. Existing in a twilight between abstraction and representation, the paintings symbolize the place where inspiration- and identity- reside. “Rachel Jones wields a distinct vision and we’re honored that the museum will be hosting her very first museum solo exhibition in the United States,” Said Monetta White, Executive Director. “She shares our commitment to exhibit work that inspires each of us to locate the joy found within ourselves. Her work carries vast entry points that allow viewers to linger, contemplate and settle inside her vivid, psychic landscapes.”