Locust Jones: All But Dead.
There is something in the works of Locust Jones that makes me think for a second, that someone has spiked my drink with a hallucinogen, I'm watching news flashes, in particular, one titled Hitchhiking in the donut of death and it's all been specially brought to me by Emotocorp[1] an organization that specializes in hijacking your brain to translate code.
Ok, so it's not true. My mind hasn't literally been tampered with, but confronted non-the-less by a mess of details in the form of image and text overlaying patterns and sometimes colour bursts usually limited to blues, reds and yellows. The need to read the text and image seems paramount. There is a search to define what it is that's going on. I still see a code in need of translation and believe it's one that derives from diarised notes made in response to reading newspapers, watching the news, all this mixed up with how it is that Jones is feeling at the time. I read the works like a terrain of art, each appearing to take you through a zoom in/zoom out technique that touches on broad reality then focusing introspectively, quasi psychological.
So Locust Jones is Emotocorp?! The media news regurgitator, working within a combat formation of linguistic distortion where fidelity and treason become elements of Jones' position, which I suspect, is a strategy mapped and translated as recorded events like military occupation or controversial political policy, sourced from the internet and news media, then using image and text and relating this metaphorically to the commonplace, making it odd or absurd.
Taking the title of the show Hitchhiking in the donut of death I queried Jones on its origin, to which he mentioned watching a clip on You Tube about the donut of death, in which a guy was doing donuts in his car and he got out while the car was still circling and it ran him over. Excited by the find, and making a leap to his own experience, "but my donut of death comes from the CT Scanner they put you in when they suspect there is something wrong with you. I have been in one before, claustrophobic, lack of space". So the camera in my mind's eye zooms in to search for clues and signs of medical analysis, contextualised thoughts scrawled in conscious streams mixed with drawings that act as invocations of desire, anger, obsession, torture, an open diary continues. The hallucinogenic effect comes with Jones' diarised form of storytelling of intersecting accounts relating to connections between multiple environments.
Take Prowlers at the Proving Ground 2008 a 500cm ink drawing, an epic construction of image narrative/multiple narratives. An analysis of imagined marching, shooting, pensive, soldier-like people squashed amongst oilrig platforms, tanks, tankers and watch houses. The text gets washed away in a blur, but then there are groups of civilians standing in groups along with stagnant portraits that hover around the edges. Curiously I find myself relating (though removed by circumstance) to one of the more relaxed figures passively watching yet still part of the shitty upheavals due to the fact that I belong to the human race. The work's medium looks like a hybrid mix of oil, blood, and the darkest of shadows concocted by the mind of spin-doctors at Emotocorp. Jones, now becoming an agent for Emotocorp in this essay and in a bid to lure and make believe, wants you to become party to the exploitation of vulnerability and to propagate its partner, violence. The mesmeric patterns made by the repetion in mark making draw you there... acknowledging the fact that the world is one big complicated mess.
Carla Cescon, October 2009
[1] "Emotocorp" a fictitious word derived from combining the words emotion and corporation.