Try Harder

A solo exhibition of sculpture and new paintings by Frederick Wright Jones, a 2010 MFA alumnus of the UB Department of Art.

In the Department of Art Lower Gallery

Center For the Arts, Room B45

On View: August 23, 2023- January 7, 2024

Reception: Th. 8/31/23, 5-8PM

To request alt text to the images on this page, please write to art-info@buffalo.edu, attention "Art Resource Manager".

Curatorial Statement:

This work, compiled over the last 6 years, is an homage to location in Place and Time. Playing off Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the Chronotope in Literature. Jones places sculpture, as language, into conversation with this linguistic tool to speak about our current condition. In this work Jones does a personal analysis of navigation in general, moving across the Atlantic, being both with his family and apart from them, the role of teaching, and the issues of access highlighted by the Covid 19 pandemic. Aesthetically, it is a look at mapping, technological evolutions, tools of violence and survival, and the nuance of visibility and invisibility. Jones contrasts the notion of the “Ritual and the Sacred” and their location between private and public as they travel through Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” into bell hook’s “Art on my Mind.”

The Artist:

Frederick Wright Jones was born in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Sculpture and Emerging Practices at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Inspired by myth, pop culture, and the utilitarian, his tactile objects work to materialize forces we neither see nor measure, and to dissect the contradictions of narrative. An Associate Professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Frederick is currently working with the mapping of history and memory. Slightly peripheral, he travels between his families in Pennsylvania, Hamburg-Germany, memory, and rememory.

http://www.fwrightjones.com/

Instagram: @frederickwrightjones

Programming:

Frederick Wright Jones presented for the Department's Visiting Artist Speaker Series, on Mon. 9/11/23, at 6:30PM in CFA 112 (the Center for the Arts Screening Room). The annual series, hosted on Monday nights during each Fall semester, is open to the public, with seating first come first serve after students registered in the Speaker Series course have been seated.

A 8/31/23 reception in the Lower Gallery included remarks by Frederick Wright Jones, a demonstration by him on the sculpture "The Devil is in the Detail", and an interactive activity where the artist instructed visitors on how to create their own red paper flowers, to add to the installation of the work "Darkness Upon the Surface of the Watery Deep" (wood, mixed media, 2023).