October 14 — November 25, 2023
As Above, So Below
Jules Buck Jones
Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the eighth solo of works by Wimberly, Texas-based artist Jules Buck Jones.
As Above, So Below is a new series of paintings and drawings by artist Jules Buck Jones that celebrates the magic of nature, from the marvelous and mysterious to the everyday and ordinary. In this new body of work, Jones weaves together large and energetic scenes of terrestrial and celestial life. The work is infused with invented mythology and narratives of creation, evolution, and extinction.
In these paintings and drawings, Jones employs his characteristic exaggerated brushwork and punchy color palette, and mixes painting styles and approaches from atmospheric, to graphic, to more rendered and resolved. The paintings are presented in a lyrical, yet direct visual vocabulary. The images reverberate through repetitive mark-making and fractured patterns. Some of the paintings are done on shaped panels, which highlight Jones’ relationship with linework, simplifying complex scenes into flat, dynamic surfaces. Other works include large format watercolors of prehistoric romance and interactions between flora and fauna, and a series of unstretched canvas paintings depicting variations on creation myths and the resilience of the natural world.
As Above, So Below draws parallels between the cycles of life on earth and the grand gestures of the cosmos and questions what it means to be an animal on this planet.
Jules Buck Jones earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA in 2005 and an MFA in Painting at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX in 2008. He is a founding member of the non-profit collective MASS Gallery and the art / science collective Animal Facts Club, both based in Austin TX. Jones has been accepted and invited to art residencies in Maine, New York, Tennessee, Vermont, the Florida Everglades and Barcelona. Jones currently teaches painting and drawing at Texas State University in San Marcos. He received the Makers Muse Award from New Mexico’s Kindle Project and in 2018 completed a large commission for the Line Hotel in downtown Austin. Recent exhibitions include: Future Fossils, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX (2019); Humid Futures, Conduit Gallery (2018); Silent Song, A Dark Dirty Place, Kyle, TX (2018); Gardens and Graveyards, Galveston Art Center, Galveston, TX (2017); Hand Me My Head, David Shelton Gallery, Houston, TX (2017). His work is in the permanent collections of: The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Everglades National Park, FL: Dell’s Children Hospital, Balcones Canyonland Preserve, Reicher Ranch, Austin, TX; Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont, TX; Fidelity Investments, Dallas, TX.