Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Photography
Website: bobjones-work.com
Bob Jones was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and received his MA in Sculpture from San Jose State University. In the late 1970s he became a founding member of WORKS/San José, an artist-run exhibition space in downtown San Jose that has operated continuously since 1977, and he later served as a board member of Pro Arts in Oakland.
Over a career spanning four decades, Jones built a body of site-generated installations and sculptural objects through a series of prominent Bay Area artist residencies, including a collaborative residency at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco (1985, with Tony May), an Artist in Residence appointment at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (1987), and a residency at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Grant. His installations and objects have been exhibited throughout the Bay Area as well as in Los Angeles and New York, at venues including New Langton Arts, the Triton Museum of Art, the De Saisset Art Museum, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.
Jones currently lives and works in Vallejo, California. His recent work investigates humanity’s shifting relationship to Mars, continuing a decades-long practice of building sculptural and installation-based bodies of work around a single sustained idea.
Jones works across sculpture, installation, photography, and text-based multiples, often building an entire body of work around one conceptual premise — sentence diagrams, language and self-projection, domestic architecture, or, most recently, Mars — and then working through that premise in a range of materials and scales, from full-room installations to small editioned objects. His installations frequently incorporate mirrors, glass, projected light, and everyday construction materials such as drywall, lumber, and galvanized sheet metal, giving even modest objects a stage-like, architectural presence.
Recurring throughout his practice is an interest in language and diagrammatic structure — sentence diagrams, signage, and printed text appear across bodies of work from the 1970s through the present — paired with a sculptor’s attention to how an object or environment is physically constructed. The result is work that reads simultaneously as linguistic play and as functional, built structure, whether the subject is a suburban storefront facade, a demolition site, or the surface of another planet.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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