Vince Jones

This Is It

Sunny Sliger and Vince Jones’ exhibition “This Is It” features hundreds of uncannily true-to-life construction paper figures of well-known personalities drawn from our image-dominated media culture. Each starts as a blank paper form like the gingerbread people found in holiday kitchens and grade-school art classes (where in fact the idea for the series arose). The artists then use their sophisticated sense of color, scale, texture and drawing-like talent with scissors to make these jolly figures who we can immediately identify: an opera singer, a cartoon hero, a politician, a ghoul, a television siren and more, seemingly go on and on in an infinite parade.

Backstories and personalities are telegraphed by dress, accessories, objects and sometimes pose via the artists’ incisive ability to pinpoint and convey each character’s essential markers. The works can well be seen as simple (though clearly not artless) representations of famous figures we have fun identifying.  The artists themselves have stated that their creations are fairly straightforward, and there is no hidden dialog behind them other than the distinct pleasure in thinking about, making and seeing them as individuals and relating to one another. 

Yet as with all intriguing works of art, the longer one looks at these figures the more potential meanings arise. After a while each of these happy beings begins to function like a little Cindy Sherman photograph filtered through the sensibility of a perceptive, artistically “talented-beyond-their-years” young person. Taking its title from a still of Michael Jackson in full-on performance, the exhibition can’t help but raise questions about identity, social roles and expectations, dress, costume, fame, fortune, incident and history. Sliger and Jones’ delightful yet multi-layered characters indeed provoke many thoughts on what these figures can represent to us; what role they have played in our lives, and, finally, whose choice it was that they have become so deeply and flawlessly lodged in our minds.