Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present The Pleasure Gardens by Sarah Jones. This will be Jones’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception with the artist will take place Friday, June 21st from 6pm-8pm.

Shifting between studio and location, color and black and white, Sarah Jones’ photographs accentuate the complexities of reality and the imaginary. Framed by her interest in the charged nature of artifice and in modes of display, she often enlists the cinematographic technique “day for night,” a filmmaking process lending the illusion of night during daytime.

Jones’ recent work cites the ornamental pleasure gardens of eighteenth and nineteenth-century London. These cultivated urban landscapes affected an Arcadian fantasy, a setting for musical entertainment and in which to promenade. This, along with more illicit activities. Open from early evening and artificially illuminated, the gardens offered an escape from city life.

In Jones’ photographs, roses in urban parks, both in bloom and nearing decay, emerge from a fictive darkness, water from an ornate fountain is suspended, held by a brief photographic exposure; compelling reminders of impermanence. A dapple gray horse is pictured in front of a gray backdrop, the photograph fixing one moment among many when its coat transitions from gray to white. Still lifes of crystals and upended glass objects allude to so-called “cabinets of curiosities” (popular in the mid 1700’s). These displays by collectors reflected a growing interest in natural history, gathering together often disparate objects from around the world. Throughout the exhibition, Jones’ use of doubling and mirroring brings attention to the three-dimensional world rendered flat, collapsing the line between surface and depth. Her works suggest the use of the camera as a means to collect and record, to preserve, to re-imagine, along with the photograph itself as a vitrine.

Sarah Jones (b.1959) is a London-based artist. Her work has been included in numerous international museum and gallery exhibitions since the early 1990s. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; National Media Museum, Bradford; Huis Marseille Foundation for Photography, Amsterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centre for Photography, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain; Le Consortium, Dijon, France. Jones’ work is held in both private and public collections. She is a Reader in Photography at Royal College of Art, London.