Evey Jones doesn’t take shortcuts. Her monotypes are the last phase of an intuitive yet exacting process. When she travels, Jones might see something out a window that attracts her attention. The artist is drawn to light and color changes in an environment, which she photographs as an aid to her memory. At home, she prints these out and begins playing with the scale and format, using Xeroxes as a means of transforming the original information. Moving to a sketchbook, she works out patterns and motifs in pen, which become the basis for a sequence of watercolors of varying sizes. This shift creates a very different relationship of her hand and movements with the page, as the process becomes increasingly tactile—from image to object. Jones then takes on large charcoal studies in which black and white assume a rich presence. Finally Jones works the plate: “my fingers in the ink, mixing it, the texture, the smell of the ink, the ‘feel’ of the press.” Never spending more than two days, she becomes absorbed with the viscosity of the ink, adding and removing in a way that is almost sculptural. Printed on silk, the bold monotypes become one with a material of ancient association and itself a natural metamorphosis. The haunting images that she creates are suggestive of narrative but defy defined space and linear time. Cloaked shapes contrast with outstretched figures—closed with open forms—simultaneously childlike and eternal. In the work selected for the “Originals” show—One Leads, One Follows—the very title suggests how meaning consists of relationship and distinction. Yet Jones undercuts any absolute reading. Instead she allows for exchanges of spatial configurations and ground, which become more of a “conversation” among elements. Admiring early Renaissance painters, Jones juxtaposes the iconic embodiment of light in her saturated blacks and whites with its more naturalistic representation. The illusory quality of light is woven into the composition as a rendered effect and as an almost mystical aura, a fluctuation from one plane or dimension to another. Combining individual memory and collective consciousness, flesh and dream, Jones seeks the unpredictable where “two unlikely things come together.” —Stephanie Grilli