The Brooklyn Rail

A Walk with D. Ann, Jilaine Jones’s expansive exhibition at 15 Orient, seems materially continuous with the steel and plaster of the gallery’s three-story industrial staircase that opens onto six spacious rooms with large windows and partially finished walls, welcoming visitors with an abundance of light and air. Distributed among them, twenty spatially engaged constructions that span two decades—some very large—combine tenderly fabricated networks of steel with powerfully modelled gestural forms in concrete, plaster, and clay, often cast directly onto their metal supports.

Jones, trained in ceramics, describes her transition to steel in terms of “lending clay more life” and “loosening up” hard walls of clay by introducing steel plates, while working simultaneously to disrupt—with references to the figure, narrative, and nature—her training in the abstract constructions of Anthony Caro and the “line drawing” sculptures of David Smith. Jones acknowledges Donald Judd’s rationality and respect for materials, but her turn to mixed media can also be seen as a reaction to tensions inherent in the formalist legacy of his “specific object.”¹ In the first room, three works, devoted to just one material each, illuminate Jones’s development, which involved hiring live models to move within her structures so she could observe their process of motion. This research is evident in the delicate articulation of the show’s titular work, The Walk with D. Ann (2011), a sculptural memorial to a deceased friend, where a network of painted steel rods suggests a rocking boat, with a staircase entry and an array of trimly welded steel plates that evoke the anatomical workings of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912).

Horizon in the Hand (1), (2) and (3) (all 2018), take inspiration from an earlier source: the horizontal posture of a Gothic effigy figure that opened up space and interaction with spectators in a way that suggested to Jones the embodied linear narrative of the “walks.” The bundled “horizons,” tubes gripped in knots of clay, achieve metallic rigidity. On a much smaller scale, MacDowell Woods (2014) extends Jones’s tensile constructions into landscape, a site for walks, with hinged layers of cut paper—obsessive, meticulous, but engagingly hand-made.

Portrait of a Solitary Walk (2007), a larger, earlier work, incorporates embedded rocks from the path into its iconic concrete figure as indexical records of the walker’s shifting attention. It further roots them in their perceived experience through Jones’s basic structure of “zones,” which treat the foreground, middle ground, and background of perspectival space as physical entities, “chunks of space,” products of empathetic self-projection into nature. Much as Albrecht Dürer did for drawing in his famous woodcut, The Draftsman of the Reclining Nude (1525–28), Jones’s constructions use three-dimensional planes and perspective lines to envision the perceptual field as sculpture. Like many of her works, Solitary Walk constructs a spatial narrative with a weighty, foreground zone (an exaggerated step), followed by a middle ground at waist height (a stage for action), under the implied gaze of a smaller, elevated background object identified with the eye and mind.

Jones lends these zones narrative interpretations that reflect her interest in animism: the foreground is subterranean, subconscious, and heavy, locked in struggle against gravity in Under the Wanderer (2017), or linked to the forbidding, mysterious object under the platform in What Surrounds Her House (2008), which was influenced by the Surrealist symbolism of David Smith’s Reliquary House (1945). Jones considers the elevated background zone more “optical,” but also identifies it with melancholy and nostalgia, as though her expanded perception remains materially connected to the depths and something of a burden borne by the walker. Another large piece, Time in the Study (2010) could be linked to this traditional theme of Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514); writing on Jasper Johns, the critic John Yau interprets the fall of the catenary curve, repeated here three times in links of steel, as an emblem of mortality.

The foreground zone especially engages Jones’s sculptural imagination, and Oxygen (2015), like Solitary Walk, bears traces of what the walker attends to at their feet. In this embodied realm of meta perception, Jones speaks of “fields,” not in reference to the visual field of the eye, but in relation to bodily awareness, to the densely interwoven figural reliefs of Roman sarcophagi and Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (1884–95)—another circular walk—an effect she projects into the tactile density and painterly patination of ceramic panels in Understory (2014) and 1 Month Fossil (2015). Jones mistrusts “table-top” works for their suggestion of sculptural autonomy and resists it in the recent Divided Grotto (2024), but the table’s framework in fact enhances the formal punch of her smaller sculptures. Jones’s hand-crafted objects recall the abstractions Philip Guston generated in transition to cartoon imagery, to his own “meta-painting.” Like the mysterious “D. Ann,” they remain present but distant, resistant in their melancholy.