Matthew Jones
In Mathew Jones' installation the gallery space is divided in half: one half measured out according to the works' equidistant placement on the floors and walls (two works lean against walls); the other half left empty. Above each of the wall-pieces hang painted (white on black) canvases bearing the slogans: homosexuality = aids; silence = death; discourse = defense; defense = disease; and disease = discourse. There would appear to be two referents for this work: the issue of homosexuality and AIDS; and Minimalism.
The works employ a number of Minimalist tropes or signatures modified in certain ways. For example a unitary form (a blank white canvas) repeated throughout the installation is transformed by a process which seems mechanical, opposed to the process of reduction which may have constituted the implied originary Minimalist form. The canvas is either swollen so that it appears to exceed its original dimensions or it hangs limply between its exposed black graphite support like a collapsed deckchair. And in the absence of any overt pictorial content the materials and construction of the works become constitutive rather than incidental to their meaning. But the corresponding textual analogues suggest a meaning beyond the works' evident materiality, a correspondence with the representation of AIDS. And while the surrounding space (the cultural and public space which, according to Rosalind Krauss, is crucial to the critical intentions of Minimalism) is implicated in the placement of works, and in particular by the leaning of several works against the walls—a sovereign Minimalist device for bringing the wall into relation with the floor—there might be, nonetheless, a residual content in the work.
A straightforward gestalt reading of the installation (that is, according to