Julie Renée Jones (b. 1984) lives in and makes work about the American midwest, concentrating on the complexities of aging and memory. In doing so she explores the confusion of reality and imagination, where actual event and surreal recollection blur. She has exhibited across the U.S., Canada, and Europe with publications of her work appearing in The British Journal of Photography, Real Simple Magazine, Fraction Magazine, and Italy’s C 41 Magazine, among others. A selection of exhibitions include 80×80 at The Mint Museum, Space Jamz with the Humble Arts Foundation, and most recently The New Face of Film, a retrospective exhibition of international artists curated by Fotofilmic, at Boise State University’s Visual Arts Center and numerous solo and two person shows at The Blue House Gallery, Wittenburg University, and Pictura Gallery. In 2015 Jones was awarded the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her series Umbra. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA from the University of Dayton. Julie currently resides in Dayton Ohio where she holds a Lecturer in photography position at the University of Dayton.
Umbra
I am interested in memory: memories controlled by imagination, reshaped by experience, and retold through photographs. In childhood, these memories are the most fantastic, frightening, dramatic, tense, formative…precisely because recollection is so unreliable. Using my own interpretations of everyday events, childhood games, the landscape of my home, and most importantly the photographs from my family archive I rewrite the perceived reality of my childhood and family’s past into new truths.
In piecing together these memories from the past I stumbled into a fictitious world where the darker undertones of American midwestern suburbia reside; where psychological experience meets a version of the past – one controlled by emotion and desire more than logic and truth. Using the visual vernacular of family picture-making with elements of extreme light, shadow, and color, I create new photographs that reference both the ritualized snapshot and my own family’s interpretation of it.
To view more of Julie’s work please visit her website.