NEW YORK, NY.- Survey, an exhibition of film and video works by Los Angeles-based artist, filmmaker, and writer William E. Jones, marks David Kordansky Gallery's second presentation at their New York gallery. His first New York survey exhibition in an art-specific context, the show is on view June 24 through August 5, 2022.

The exhibition features a representative selection of ten videos made by Jones over the last three decades, divided among three simultaneous projections. Two projections account for a single program, mostly featuring works with sound, that repeats every other hour; the third is dedicated to Rejected (2017), a single silent work almost eight hours in length.

Jones’s videos, which take a wide variety of forms, range from the documentary essay The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) to kaleidoscopic arrangements of found footage like Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012) in which elaborate mathematical formulas are used to weave together archival material in bracing new ways. Jones occupies a stance in which formal experimentation is inseparable from sociopolitical critique, but his position cannot be reduced to platitudes of the sort that often characterize artists’ forays into charged or topical material. Rather, he seeks to immerse himself in the insoluble contradictions that rise to the surface when historical documents are excavated, rearranged according to new parameters, and seen in new contexts.

Jones (b. 1962, Canton, Ohio) has been the subject of many solo exhibitions and retrospectives at institutions including the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2015); St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2013); Austrian Film Museum, Vienna (2011); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010); and ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano, Italy (2009). Recent and notable group exhibitions include Histories of our Time, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland (2019); FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2018); Ordinary Pictures, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); and Whitney Biennial 1993 and 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is in the public collections of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; St. Louis Art Museum; and Tate, London, among other museums. His latest novel, I Should Have Known Better, was published in 2021. He is also the author of True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell, Halsted Plays Himself, and I’m Open to Anything. Jones lives and works in Los Angeles.