Aaron Jones at Zalucky Contemporary

Artist: Aaron Jones

Exhibition title: Chasing Shadows

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 7 – October 21, 2023

Photography: Em Moor / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary

A swath of flowing silver fabric undulates as if controlled by some unseen force, the branches overhead gently swaying in the breeze. Obscured images of wings, legs, and oxidized copper statues form the shapes of creatures both recognizable from myth and found in the wild, while the screech of seagulls mixes with a transmission from another realm, its message garbled upon impact. Keep your eyes open and listen closely. What do you hear? What do you see?

Aaron Jones plays between the natural and the supernatural. The artist combines video and collage to create an environment populated by animals, plants, angels, and phantoms. Inspired by an encounter with a ghostly presence in the artist’s childhood home in Pickering, Ontario, a video piece follows a spectral figure as it weaves its way across the local shoreline. As viewers make their way through a landscape of tall green trees and pebbled beaches, the camera tracks the movement of the invisible apparition without ever arriving close enough to make contact. This distance creates a suspended longing between viewer and unearthly subject, a voyeuristic intimacy left to unravel on the forest floor.

This looping, uncanny video is anchored by a series of collages in which the artist manipulates snippets of found images, layering them in close proximity to create the outline of elephants, lizards, and many-winged cherubs. These collages operate as optical illusions, forcing the eye to oscillate between the image as a whole and the fragmented bits from which it’s composed. When presented alongside Jones’s video, these phantasmic images offer a destablizing platform from which to revisit our biassed perception of the natural and spiritual world. Like the sight of an unknown something out of the corner of one’s eye, the work of Aaron Jones encourages careful contemplation of both our external environment and our own interiority.

Aaron Jones (b. 1993, Toronto, Canada) creates objects and images to explore the inherent possibilities in world-building and abstraction. Employing found images, video and lens-based media, he works with different forms of collage to build characters and spaces that reflect upon the nuances of his own upbringing and current life, as a way of finding peace. Recent exhibitions include As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, works from the Wedge Art Collection at The Polygon, Vancouver (2023), We Are Story: The Canada Now Photography Acquisition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2023), Timecode Butterfly for Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2022), GTA21, a triennial survey presented by MOCA, Toronto (2021), Three Thirty at Doris McCarthy Gallery (2020) and Ragga NYC at Mercer Union (2018). His solo exhibition Open Fist, Closed Palm at Zalucky Contemporary was awarded The Gattuso Prize for “Best Featured Exhibition” during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (2020). He graduated with a BFA in Photography from OCADU in 2018. His work is included in the collections of The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Ryerson Image Centre, Wedge Curatorial Projects, Royal Bank of Canada and numerous private collections.