MOCA Pacific Design Center
The West Coast solo museum debut of work by artist and cartoonist Ben Jones, this exhibition features new videos and paintings that both develop and diverge from his earlier practice, particularly in the collective Paper Rad. Advancing Jones’s earlier interest in mass media and “retro-tech” aesthetics, but in a comparatively polished style, the works in Ben Jones: The Video incorporate colorful, fluorescent symbols and forms that allude to technology and pop culture, their populist, graphic aesthetic reflecting Jones’s “day job” as a commercial animator. (Jones is the creator of the Cartoon Network show The Problem Solverz and has created music videos for Beck, M.I.A., and Coldplay.) Dominating the show are a series of “video paintings” comprising projections over painted canvas, typically tropey video loops over perspectival, geometric patterns; also on view is a video of a figure in the installation’s exact gallery space, viewing the rest of the exhibition’s works through VHS tapes on a monitor. This work implied a metanarrative to the entire exhibition, as suggested by the show’s title, in which the viewer’s procession through the galleries constitutes the true work of art.