Nancy Jones

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My paintings examine how femininity is produced, recognized, and carried through images. My current series, Feminine Nature, begins with found photographs of beauty contestants posed in landscapes. I remove the sashes, banners, and titles that originally organized the image, then paint the figure with weight and specificity while the surrounding landscape becomes increasingly loose, unstable, and gestural. I am interested in what remains after the explicit category disappears. Without the title she was competing for, the woman is still legible through posture, gesture, expression, dress, and the learned arrangement of the body before a camera. Painting these figures slowly allows me to dwell on that legibility and on the accumulated visual conventions through which femininity becomes recognizable. The landscape carries its own history. Women have long been placed in relation to nature as a way of imagining femininity as timeless, instinctive, beautiful, or outside history. In these paintings, the figure retains volume and presence while the landscape begins to dissolve around her. The tension between those two modes—solid body and unstable environment—allows the image to move between representation and abstraction without relinquishing either. My studio practice extends over four decades and is closely connected to my research in visual culture and media philosophy. I think of images as structures that do more than represent their subjects: they organize ways of seeing,...

Artwork