reviews > St Louis, MO

Amelia-Colette Jones
Amelia-Colette Jones

3/21/15 10:24 AM

How to create a drawing? Some folks, mostly those who don’t actually make drawings, might think it easy enough to just sit down, put marker to paper, and let freeform expression do its thing. Others realize the necessity of rules, so they devise them. Amelia-Colette Jones generates dizzyingly associative pictures in the oddest of shapes by applying directives that dictate how certain colors and letters must behave. The phrase at the center of each drawing can be tricky to decipher—I discerned the individual terms you, welcome, place, bring and possibly the sentence you have me dry—but reading seems somewhat beside the point. More germane is to follow the colorfully outlined forms that eddy off Jones’s scripts in all directions (not just the typical left to right, up to down of English text). Fabulousness results: I spied brightly plumed peacocks, sliced open opera cakes and trippy Victorian endpapers, all of which would have been much duller to evoke with words used in their usual way.

—Lori Waxman