Sarah Jones' (Bartlett Fund) work centers on family house she visited in Memphis, Tennessee. The original intellectual and artistic impetus for focusing on this specific house came from the many and varied wallpaper patterns in its rooms. Sigmund Freud used pattern to incite a kind of hypnosis in his patients and spur recollections from the unconscious. I began to think that I was using pattern in much the same way that Freud did, except that I was my own patient.
I thus began to consider the house as many things: a structure, a vessel, and a site of patterns, human residue, artifacts, and thresholds; a place to dine and share warmth, a place in which to settle into arm chairs and occupy beds, and also a place to rise up from them and continue on. It is house as way station, as metaphor, as representation, as monument, as something photographed, explored, and reproduced in paint. However, painted representation can only be partial and subjective, and meaning, like memories, must be pieced together from these sometimes isolated fragments. The act of painting has also allowed me to introduce forces of my choosing, which reflect the decay and deterioration that is inevitable for both the structure of the house and the structure of my memories. Eventually, the pattern gives in to the medium just like the memories give in to the force of time.
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