“...for surely, I believe there is sense and reason…not only in all creatures,but in every part of every particular creature.” — Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666

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Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Delirious Creatures, a solo exhibition of recent works by Samantha Jones. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 29 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery’s location at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY. A catalogue of works is also available on Artsy.

 

Delirious Creatures is an invitation to encounter material imagination as it dreams and wanders, slipping in and out of forms, and propagating new worlds in each gesture. Meaning “madness,” or to “deviate, be deranged,” or literally, to “go off the furrow,” delirium offers an agricultural equivalent to the familiar industrial metaphor of “going off the rails.” By going off the furrow of human attention and focus, delirium opens the threshold of the self as a portal to wandering into other modes of being. 

 

In a universe where nothing comes from nothing, there is no birth — only rebirth into a new constellation of being. To be remade, there must be a willingness to become unmade. The “I” loses its potency, taking flight as an insect, or a bird that just flew by the window. Thought takes flight along with it, embracing a feeling of what it must be like to float along in the air, subject to the slightest shift in the wind. This is more than pure imagination — one’s body takes flight along with the mind, subject to phantom sensations of feathers, breath and fur. 

 

These works make visible the traces of other lives as they move through their habitat and through the artist as an illuminator, resonance chamber, and conduit. Drawing upon automatic practices such as decalcomania, ecstatic painting and assemblage, colors and textures shapeshift to blur distinctions between one another. The inherent energy of material — be it wood, mushroom, insect, mineral, water, or light — communicates bewildering messages in its own transmutation. Speculation then becomes a sensual “waking dream” to capture the creative residue of these encounters. These actions are uncomfortable; they feel absurd and without purpose, and yet they are able to escape the distinctly human need for purpose, or value. Being, as vital energy acting through material, breaks down the boundaries of self-imposed perception, compelling one to feel through another from the inside out, and opening one’s own being to care, perhaps for the first time. 

 

Jones is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art (IDSVA), and she invited other 2024 graduates of the program to exhibit in a concurrent show in The Project Space at Amos Eno. The group exhibition, Praxis and the Artist-Philosopher, celebrates the innate curiosity and wonder inherent in human nature. Challenging conventional philosophical frameworks that prioritize scientific knowledge, the artist-philosopher advocates for a form of thinking grounded in wonderment and a poetic understanding of the world.

 

About the Artist

Sam Jones is a materials-based installation artist living in the coastal woods of Maine. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art. Her dissertation, Wild Care: A Vital Surrealist Inquiry on Loss in the Wood, considers new and vital etho-ecologies within the philosophy of aesthetics. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maine, Orono. She has participated in residencies including the Worm Farm Institute, in WI, Vermont Studio Center in VT, and Pinea Linea De Costa in Rota, Spain. She exhibits her work throughout New England, New York, and abroad.