Our modern world is one that is filled with screens. Computers, smart phones, digital advertisements; the world is now perceived through a rectangular frame. How does this experience augment our view of reality? Does it make the two worlds, the virtual, and the real, less separate than they once were? This exhibition is a response to some of those questions.
Simone Jones, a Toronto-based artist and professor at OCAD University, has been investigating the artistic application of robotics and technology for over two decades. An evolving practice, her work started with analog robots made from bits and pieces she could find at surplus stores and now includes CGI (Computer Generated Images) and video installation.
In All That Is Solid, Jones explores spatial contradictions; near and far, surface and depth, illusion and realism. Using photography, film, and CGI, Jones explores how we document, and how our perception of reality can shift through various applications of what we record. In the central work of the exhibition, four screens lean against the wall with images, both black and white and CGI, flowing one into the other. Jones, by conjoining images, is attempting to create a hybrid spaceāasking the viewer to focus their attention on the nature of the images themselves.
In a related work, Jones produces stereogramsāimages that allow us to see in three dimensions without the use of external visual aids. Alongside this, a video installation combines illusion and reality, and a dialogue is created between what is real and what is āfakeā. However, for the viewer, just one single reality is the result.
Simone Jonesā installation is created specifically for the space at the RMG.