MARY JONES | Reservations

High Noon is pleased to present Reservations, the gallery’s fourth exhibition with New York based artist Mary Jones, examining the seductive, curated, and often morally ambiguous spaces of contemporary luxury culture. Jones combines her language of trompe l’oeil and gestural abstraction with a range of digital processes. Drawing from images engineered to sell an experience rather than document a particular place, she constructs her own “designed spaces,” calling attention to ideas surrounding authorship and manufactured environments.

 

Exclusively sourced from designer Erik Kuster’s book, Metropolitan Luxury, photo reproductions undergo a series of filters that consecutively separate the images from their original context. First, paint is applied directly to the original printed surfaces— the pages torn from the book. Jones then photographs these painted pages,  reinforcing photography as an interpretive process. This choice emphasizes the artist’s eye, the lens distortion, and the texture of the print as a mediated variable. The resulting images are then greatly enlarged and printed on canvas, creating a giclée (which is itself an invented French word) of unified pixelization. This bridges the original photo and the painterly interventions. It also serves as the underpainting layer for the finished work, wherein Jones takes great measure to prevent us from discerning the original from the final passages of painterly process.

 

Jones is less interested in defying the source material than in working with it to expose underlying tensions. The works’ seamlessness becomes a conceptual through-line, as spaces representing a sanitized sense of “elsewhere” are amalgamated into something between corporeal and transient— remixed and redressed into confessions of  artificiality. In doing so, Jones imports materials and aesthetics  from one authored environment into another, recalling Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, in which he describes contemporary image culture  as increasingly defined not by the production of wholly “new” material, but by acts of layering and reframing. Published long before  our current discourse surrounding AI-generated imagery, Lessig identified a cultural shift in which meaning emerges through trans‑formation itself. The works in the exhibition occupy this condition uneasily, wherein Jones challenges the integrity of the image while asserting painting’s dominance in illusionistic image-making and aesthetic status.

 

In Vanishing Points (2026), Jones stacks multiple luxury interiors into a single composition, ignoring the images’ original gravitational logic, while creating a new, albeit unstable, sun-splashed situation. Gesture contradicts the perspectival order of construction with rampant chaos. Colorful swaths and smears function as indicators of low resolution, both socially as well as digitally. Calcio (2025), pushes the source imagery toward near-total illegibility, leaving behind only fragments of firelight and brassy reflections. Broad yellow gestures and spray paint push the image into a link of competing forms that metabolize rather than negate the original photograph. The Resort (2026) presents paradise as something precarious, nocturnal, suggesting a montage of memories, desires, and fetishes. Jones leaves portions of the  original imagery visible at the canvas edge, interspersed with some disruptive tears, allowing the mechanics of mediation to remain partially exposed rather than fully resolved or cohesive.

 

Across the exhibition, Jones treats luxurious properties not as documentary material but as something continuously performed into existence and proliferated by viewership. By refusing to fully reconcile gesture and source image, the works leave visible the ways in which contemporary desire is constructed.

 

Mary Jones received a BFA and MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She began her career in Los Angeles and has been living and working in NYC since 1986. Jones has shown her work in galleries and museums internationally, most recently at High Noon in 2023 and Steffany Martz in 2022. Other exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, John Molloy Gallery, Ovsey Gallery, Cugliani Gallery, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, Robert Green Fine Arts, Marlborough Chelsea, and Cenci Gallery, Rome. She is in many notable collections, including the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in the NY Times, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Artnews, the Brooklyn Rail, and Whitehot Magazine, among others and is included in the book, “L.A.Rising, SoCal Artists Before 1980,” by Lyn Kienholz. Jones is a Senior Critic at RISD, where she has taught since 1998, and an instructor at SVA since 2009. As an art writer, she has also contributed to the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and artcritical.