RUCKUS - solo exhibition 2018

In his first solo exhibition, "Ruckus", multi-media artist Ken Jones Jr., creates a playful world where cowboys carry rose, horses can fly, and eagles have golden wings. August 18 - September 15, 2018

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Review of Ken Jones Jr.--RUCKUS/ Brick and Mortar Gallery.   by Elizabeth Johnson

          It’s fitting that Ken Jones, Jr., son of Ken Jones, Sr., is preoccupied with copies, pattern and repetition. Prints of paper doll cowboy outfits from his Texan boyhood float on dotted, color-separated fields of his own design. The headless cowpokes seem to have also lost their boots. More personal than Richard Prince’s billboard- sized images of Marlboro men, but just as attractive and hermetic, Ken’s dolls carry the emotional charge of admiring, imitating and having crushes on male family members and cowboy neighbors.
          Bronc-busting men overlap in red, light blue, blue, gold, teal and hot pink on a black background, recalling Las Vegas neon, danger and blurred split seconds on horseback; though unobtrusively, rainbows shooting out of horse hooves, soaring hawks and roses tilt the mood toward the feminine. Embroidery, sewing, quilting, salvaged love letters and the mania for thrift inherited from his mother imbue Jones Jr.’s subject--cardboard cutout, manly ideal--with substance.