Artists Ai Campbell, Sara Jones & Anne Mourier
Exhibition extended through Sunday, July 16th, 2017
Join us for Closing Cocktails: Wednesday, July 12, 6 – 8:30pm

Ground Floor Gallery is pleased to present, Provenance, an investigation of unfamiliar family histories through travel, artmaking and conjecture.  Featuring Brooklyn-based artists Ai Campbell, Sara Jones, and Anne Mourier, Provenance illustrates each artist’s attempt to demystify an estranged familial connection through explorations both in and outside of the studio space.  By revisiting unknown or misunderstood identities and destinations of yore, Campbell, Jones and Mourier intimately craft tender, mixed-media portraits that veer fluidly between the biographical and autobiographical.  As a result, the exhibition emerges as a real time platform where hazy ancestral ties are elucidated and reimagined.

Ai Campbell

I’ve been fascinated with detailed monochromatic works since the first time I saw the beautiful landscape drawings of my grandfather, a successful industrial designer. During the war, he spent his spare time drawing the places where he was stationed. The consistent 5 x 7 inch works contained fine details in the vivid contrast of black and white. Because he passed away before I was born, those drawings were my only interactions with him.

The simple yet explosive black and white spaces enhance the contour of shapes allowing one to see vividly simple yet critical object elements. An obsession with this type of imagery has become the central theme of my own work: engaging the most basic elements of life to build or extract the most complex.

Sara Jones

I was granted a traveling fellowship in 2017 to support an ongoing project exploring the intersection of personal and historical memory within physical, social and archival spaces, which will culminate in the re-creation of the journey that two of my ancestors took through Europe in 1844. For five weeks, I will travel across seven countries to gather historical data, images, natural materials and cultural artifacts.

In 1844, my ancestor Calvin Jones traveled from Tennessee to Europe with his daughter Octavia. Each kept a journal, and Octavia also kept a “book of relics,” in which she pressed plant specimens from each of the locales visited. My project takes these artifacts as the beginning of an investigation into place, memory, and the ways that souvenirs shape the experience of both. My work has enduringly pursued these themes, specifically through the places we inhabit, often using personal family history, homes, and artifacts as inspiration. My work demands an intense immersion in spaces and places, and this process spurs a fascination with the myriad ways of remembering—journals, photographs, souvenirs, relics—and how these cues inflect and affect our memories.

Drawing upon the research I’ve performed for this project, both into my own family history, and the histo- ry of the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, this project will be framed through the questions examining individual versus collective memory as well as the potential violence and erasures enacted through the writing and recording of history. I will also investigate the idea of the “boundary”— geographical, political, cultural and personal—as well as questions of economics and privilege. What conspired to allow for such a journey in 1844, and what are the correspondences between those historical circumstances and my own privilege as a white American moving freely through Europe in this charged political moment? Building upon these formative questions, my project will generate a dialectic between the historical past and my own engagement with it in the present, with meaning emerging from the amor- phous space between the two.

Translating the research materials gleaned over the course of my journey—a written journal, material artifacts, and a series of photographs and videos—the ensuing project will stage a dialogue between my family’s history and the environmental, political and social changes that have occurred in the interim 173 years, resulting in the creation of a new and updated archive of a journey.

Follow along on Instagram @sarajones00 or in her Travel Journal at sara-jones.com/travel-journal

Anne Mourier

Distilled from a language of biblical symbolism, Marys addresses contemporary conceptions of femininity through the pervasive but opposing archetypes of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene:  one dutiful, maternal, complacent; the other sensual, inquisitive, and bold.  Implementing the diptych as the overarching format throughout the series, pairs of photographs and sculptures portray each in equal measure and without personal bias, leaving viewers’ intuitive reactions and aesthetic preferences to construct a personal mirror that strives to question and redefine the parameters history has placed around the individual, the woman, and the collective human condition.

Anne Mourier