Kelly Lynn Jones: Love Letter

January 15 - February 26, 2022

The Pit Los Angeles

The Pit is pleased to present Love Letter, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by LA-based Kelly Lynn Jones. On view from January 15 – February 26, 2022, with a public reception from 4-7pm on Saturday January 15th, this exhibition featuring 10 new paintings celebrates Jones' return to oil on canvas after twelve years of dynamic alternate practices.

As immersive paintings built for “long views,” Jones’ finds joy in technical challenges regarding color, texture, scale, and perspectival shifts that discover uncanny moments in figurative narrativity. Rendered as 8x10 studies then scaled up with acrylic and oil paint, these are exercises in mapping objective correlatives: what’s important in the moment, and why? While some semi-autobiographical details are included, the paintings live more in symbolic realms if taken from the Greek, symballein “to throw together,” which suggests combining worlds to render invisibility. Natural symbols, private symbols, and conventional symbols complicate Jones’ landscapes of memory that seize and concentrate potentially lost moments. Depictions of figures sleeping, swimming, playing music, stretching, and conversing prioritize physical touch, while botanical, architectural elements, and domestic objects and animals overlap or abut to highlight boundaries in close quarters. Decorative and ornamental moments flourish in playful blasts that appreciate collage and dense patterning. Transposing evocations of claustrophobia with gleeful love and play, these snapshots of camaraderie “slow down” moments, as Jones says, not nostalgically but maybe to explore tensions between inside and outside per Bachelard’s dialectic that champions transgression of dualistic contrasts. In Jones’ paintings, calm and ecstasy are filtered through serendipitous slips, uncertainties, disruptions, and confusions, in part alluding to her experience of early motherhood during a pandemic.

If anthropocentrism is removed here, these are radiant portraits of Sun and Moon. Their extreme light sources demand more immediate attention than the humans depicted, and compositions are arranged around spotlit beams. Pets, household objects, water, and textile design benefit from their bright, but at times somber, effulgence. One could almost call these paintings a return to Late Renaissance Mannerism: exaggerated usages of chiaroscuro, stretched figures, juxtaposed with sfumato (gradual shading) that takes a hard look at how to represent bodies in spaces where there’s a lot more going on than bodies. For Jones, the sun and moon in these pictures (and in life) offer continuity through their commingling of orientation and disorientation. This theme frames anxiety and error as wild rides that arrive at beauty, as Elaine Scarry explains in her book On Beauty and Being Just:

“Those who recall making an error in beauty inevitably describe one of two genres of mistake. The first… is the recognition that something formerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded. The second is the sudden recognition that something from which the attribution of beauty had been withheld deserved all along to be so denominated.”
Love letters to whom? Intuitive logic is embedded in these, as in fairy tales, leaving ample space for highly personal responses to that question. Expressions of solace and recognition — plus lots of witchy cats — lead the way.

For more information please email info@the-pit.la