Ronald Feldman Fine Arts will exhibit two new installations, All that is Solid and End of Empire, by Simone Jones. Jones uses film and kinetic sculpture to explore perception and the relationship between time and space, particularly physical materials’ capacity to express temporal characteristics. Jones’ work incorporates elements of performance and engages the viewer experientially through a visual navigation of the boundary between real and imagined space.

Themes in the exhibition are influenced by Marshall Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, published in 1982, in which the author discusses modernization through western literature of the time (Marx, Baudelaire and Goethe, among others) and contrasts this recorded experience with philosophical tenets of modernism. Taking as her premise that nothing is solid, Jones situates her eye partly in the tradition of these visionaries while using digital media to examine the certainty of technological flux in our time.

All That Is Solid, 2011, a four-screen 10-minute 3D animation, combines computer-generated cubes and large shapes suggesting mass with black-and-white photographic images of corridors and staircases highlighting perspective to create a hybrid space both representational and imaginary. The installation is an immersive environment spanning the length of the gallery wall, interfering with perceptual boundaries of foreground and middle-ground in which everything seems unhinged and floating.

End of Empire, 2011, made in collaboration with Lance Winn, is a custom-built robotic dolly and track which projects a 28-minute video inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire. The robot’s camera arm, invented by the artist to enable the frame’s movement, projects a black-and-white video image of the Empire State building across the gallery walls and ceiling and then reverses back to its original position to eventually disappear from the skyline. End of Empire comments on the possibility of a declining American empire, re-appropriating the historic/iconic building as a symbol of loss rather than promise. Transforming the conventional viewing of a film as static object, the audience is forced to physically change positions in order to experience the film as a performative projection.

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts exhibited Jones’ Perfect Vehicle (2003-2006), a three-wheeled machine which utilizes the monitored breathing of its passenger to regulate its speed, in a three person exhibition titled One Part Human in 2010. Jones, who has been making kinetic sculpture since 1989, is an Associate Professor of Art in the Integrated Media Program at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and the recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Canada Council. Her work has been included in group shows at the following institutions: Centre des Artes Contemporains, Montreal; MediaLab, Madrid; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; the Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta; V2 Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam; and Ludwig Museum, Budapest.