Brilliance, Found and Re-shaped
by Kenneth Baker
SF Chronicle
Saturday, August 22, 2009

Cassandra Jones, who divides her time between New York and Ojai (Ventura County), exploits some of the comic and philosophical potential of digital imaging. In reducing all images to a common "substance," digitizing also connects them in ways that no photographer could anticipate.

In "Lightning Drawing I" (2009), part of Jones' show at Baer Ridgway, she assembled more than a dozen found photographs of lightning strikes, piecing the jagged bolts captured in the pictures into a silhouette of a bounding rabbit.

A work such as this leaves us no clue as to how much labor it involved. It might have entailed hours or weeks of effort. The Internet makes images available in abundance, maybe in too much abundance.

Jones' "Lightning Drawings" revive in 21st century terms the old Surrealist notion, with roots in psychoanalysis and mystical tradition, of a hidden order behind manifest reality that only the right sort of decoding or shakeup can reveal.

Jones' stop-frame video piece "Snow Ball" (2009) keeps a snowball - actually a sequence of them - at the center of the screen, as peripheral details of the pictures that contain them jerk through their arbitrary changes.
The snowball functions as a cultural pivot around which turn trivial differences in families' records of their fun. At another level, it figures as a nugget of folk-post-minimalist sculpture, embedded in the everyday almost invisibly, as any good post-minimalist would prefer.

In her most impressive video, "Single Frame Animation #10" (2009), Jones recomposed and reshot pictures of nine flying geese sequentially so that one at the center of the frame appears to fly. In fact, the geese - their wings captured respectively in different positions - replace one another at the center serially to produce a staccato simulation of a single bird flying.

Jones' work makes implicit tribute to Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneer of photographic motion studies, suggesting that the current state of imaging technology and cultural self-awareness warrants analogous investigation.