JOSEPHINE HALVORSON, LESLIE HEWITT, JENNIE C. JONES

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present a group exhibition of work by three gallery  APT artists - Josephine Halvorson, Leslie Hewitt, and Jennie C. Jones - on view from December 10, 2015 through January 23, 2016.

Josephine Halvorson makes paintings on-site and in real time, transcribing duration, environment and her own perceptions through the medium of paint. Looking hard at the world around her, latent histories are expressed and new understandings of the everyday emerge. Her most recent body of work, created while a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, marks the first time the artist has worked serially. Each painting, made over the course of one night, is a distinct, extended and intimate engagement with one window that looks onto the grounds of the Villa Medici and the city beyond. Exhibiting several of these works at once, she dislodges the window from its actual location and time, making public an otherwise private view and conflating present with past.

Leslie Hewitt uses the language of photography to examine temporality, the complexity and strength of memory, and how we experience or interpret lapses in historical narratives. The Still Life series reads as both photograph and sculptural intervention – the artwork is positioned leaning on the wall, changing the way we perceive and physically encounter the image. In each photograph there is a constant yet subtle refrain, provided by James Baldwin's seminal 1963 book, The Fire Next Time. This historically dynamic text is placed within and quietly disrupts Hewitt's modernization of a 17th century still-life composition – referenced most cunningly in the inclusion of the traditional symbolic citrus fruit, a perfectly sliced lemon – as well as found photographs, books, and maple wood board.

Jennie C. Jones' work exposes the connections between conceptual and avant-gardeAfrican American music, and the cultural, political, and historical ideas surrounding Minimalism and Abstraction. Her "acoustic paintings" constructed from industrial sound absorbing panels suggest both the aural and physical dynamics of listening, while formally hearkening the geometry of music notation -- in particular that of the “bar line” found at the end of a measure. In this exhibition two collage works are titled after Blues songs, easing the viewer into a sensorial experience of perhaps recalling and internally "hearing" a tune that is stimulated by a visual experience. The new paintings on view investigate "the gesture of sound," exploring forms of improvisation within expressionist painting, juxtaposed against the stillness and containment of the acoustic panels. Her restrained palette of gray functions as a rich cultural metaphor, a color residing between the binary - gray space as a "rest," "break" or moment of hush.