PORTLAND, ORE.- Joseph Jones creates exquisitely rendered, emotionally charged paintings that examine contemporary culture and its evolving relationship to images. Jones's animals and flowers are painted with both precision and feeling—each a composite drawn from the artist's vast personal archive of thousands of images sourced from the internet, books, newspapers, and other media. Mining this archive, he explores the tension between the particular and the archetypal, between reality and imagination, and more broadly examines how the overwhelming number of images we encounter daily affects us and tells us about our culture and values.

Jones's paintings engage with the history of painting—gesturing toward both old and new traditions—while pursuing images or experiences that are wholly contemporary. Working consistently at small-scale with a logic of seriality, the artist explores how images, now instantly accessible and ubiquitous, both dissolve into one another and remain resolutely distinct. On the one hand, the hyperreality of Jones's images has the effect of an amalgamated infinite scroll, a mishmash of the most potent signifiers. On the other hand, each is intimate, closely cropped and stripped of contextual information, its surface carefully rendered in layers of paint and sanding to establish a direct, one-on-one relationship between painting and viewer.

Concurrent with the exhibition, the gallery will screen Carolee Schneemann's Infinity Kisses–The Movie, 2008. © The Carolee Schneemann Foundation. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Joseph Jones (b. 1985, London UK; lives and works in Sussex, UK) graduated from the Royal College of Art London in 2010 and the University of Arts London in 2008. Jones has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York, NY; Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA; The Artists Room, London, UK; and Roland Ross, Margate, UK.