Born in Dublin in 1978, Jesse Jones creates works that primarily take the form of film and video. She explores historical instances of communal culture that resonate with contemporary society and politics. The artist isolates forms and subjects, often through the use of Brechitan theatre techniques of estrangement, as a tool for both re-imagining and directly intervening in social discourse. She has recently had solo exhibitions at venues such as Spike Island, Bristol; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; and REDCAT, Los Angeles; as well as public work such as 12 Angry Films, a temporary drive-in cinema project in Dublin in 2005. She is currently working on a public art commission for the Convention Centre Dublin, commissioned by The OPW in conjunction with Create for 2013.

Mahogany 2009 (35 mins 16mm)

Re-scripted from the final scene of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1927 opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Jones’s film tells the story of a city outside of society, whose inhabitants are offered a space of ‘infinite freedom’ as long as they pay enough money. This freedom manifests itself in an excessive indulgence of pleasures. Mahogany, shot in the Australian outback, restages this fictitious city in the wake of its collapse, as a dialogue between the city’s architect Begbick, and a Whisper Choir made up of its inhabitants. With the suspension of time, and setting the action in the void of the desert, the video takes the allegorical geographical location and historical moment as a starting point for a critique of present political conditions. Whilst Brecht intended Mahagonny to be a criticism of the false freedoms of the Weimar Republic, Jesse Jones tests the marginality of political gesture and the crisis of forms of viable political action in contemporary post-utopian society.

The Predicament of Man 2010 (3 mins 16mm and digital mixed media)

Using footage shot in an opal mine in Cobber Pedy, Australia, intercut with over a thousand still images that appear momentarily on screen, Jones subliminally contrasts the desolate landscape with flashes of often recognisable 20/21st century icons and events. The Predicament of Man creates an uneasy and foreboding slippage in time that hints at an apocalyptic future. Its title is borrowed from an essay in Limits to Growth, by the economic think tank; The Club of Rome in 1972. The Predicament of Man examines the consequences of exponential growth theories of late capitalism and how they may not only over stretch our resources carrying capacities, but also our sensory capacity to perceive reality itself.

Against The Realm of the Absolute 2011 (12mins 16mm )

Commissioned by Collective gallery Edinburgh, set in a distant future in which a great plague has wiped out the male population of the world. Adapted in part, from Joanna’s Russ’s iconic separatist feminist Sci-Fi novel from 1975, The Female Man. Against the Realm of the Absolute seeks to investigate the multiple narratives of Feminism and how it is inevitably tied to a critic of Capitalism itself. Filmed in the ash lagoons of Cockenzie power station and made in collaboration with a feminist megaphone choir formed by Jones in Edinburgh in 2011, Against The Realm of the Absolute attempts to attend to the multiple possible dytopic future crisis we might face and how, through this very act of fictional speculation, we may in turn open up critiques of our present reality.