Life is too short to be serious, Benjamin Jones’ “Welcome to the Theater” reminds viewers

Studying one of Benjamin Jones’ mixed-media sketches is a bit like stepping into a child’s lucid nightmare and realizing that all the monster wants is a hug. 

The Burton-esque characters that populate Jones’ work are not monsters at all but amorphous animals whose bowling pin bodies and expressions of angst remind viewers how it is to feel ill, and vulnerable and alone. 

Jones, however, doesn’t see his work as scary.

“It’s silly. It’s nice,” the artist said of Offers in Red, a piece he described as “a portrait of madness.” 

Jones, who earned his BFA from the State University of West Georgia in 1977 and was the 1994 recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Southern Arts Federation, lives on Tybee Island where he works as a grocer. The Atlanta-born creative has returned to art as a source of release and comfort after a hiatus while he was caretaking his mother and dealing with personal health issues. 

Internal turmoil is a recurring theme in “Welcome to the Theater,” Jones’ second solo exhibition, which will run until February 24 at the Whitespace gallery in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood. The exhibit includes a wide array of the 2D and 3D mixed-media work created over four decades.

Jones has found artistic inspiration from art history, pop culture, current events and a personal illness — Bell’s Palsy —  which temporarily paralyzed his face. His 1998 self-portrait Pain II is inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream and depicts a shell-shocked figure wearing an eye patch.  During his illness, Jones isolated himself indoors.

“I though I was like this monster of Notre Dame,” Jones said. In retrospect, he admits that he probably didn’t look as bad as he thought he did.

Often, Jones creates for fun or for catharsis. He says he sometimes just puts pencil to paper and whatever is on his mind ends up in the drawing.

“There could have been 101 things I was thinking about,” Jones said. “I don’t want to know what I’m doing. I want to discover. I don’t want to plan.” 

His pieces form organically. Some land; others don’t. Jones admits he thought at least one of his sketches would never “see the light of day.” Yet Susan Bridges, the owner of Whitespace, included the piece in the exhibit. The unified exhibit showcases the absurdity of Jones’ personal and political reality.

“FACISM” and “PRESIDENTS ARE NOT KINGS” are just two of the buzzwords Jones layered onto every square centimeter of a 38 x 35 map of the United States. Jones began the mixed-media project after the 2016 election and scrawled words and phrases every time he heard Trump say something or heard something about him in the media. The finished piece 21st Century Map reveals the country’s divided and fear-stricken state during the 45th president’s administration.

Jones completed his No More Borders in 2003, it fits seamlessly into the silent political conversation aroused by many pieces in the exhibit. Abstract lines across a child’s body, which might have held different meaning when they were drawn, now summon imagery of an ICE jail cell. The crudely-sketched child appears trapped or caged. Its pin-prick arms reach upwards, helplessly.

Stick-like limbs are a common trope in many of Jones’ pieces. At other times they look like exposed bones. Anatomy is inexact so that appendages and other body parts could be wings that have failed to usher their bearer into flight. In Well-Avoided appendages appear like quills or pins, rendering the three detached figures un-huggable. Rabbits and cats commonly populate Jones’ work, but he also depicts human characters like a neurotic duchess in 13 Yellow Birds and the infamous former president in The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Postage stamps from Idaho, Montana and other states layer the background of Happy Chihuahua. In the foreground a chihuahua exposes its teeth barking, “Bow. Wow. Bow.” A pattern that looks a bit like the fingerprint ridges and curls augments the chihuahua’s minimalist black outline.

Psychedelic patterns offer his pieces a dream-like quality, but they are not serene. The figures contrast too starkly with their folksy backgrounds. This contrast reveals a certain irony: 

Life is too short to be serious. In intervals, it is frightening and even terrible, but it never stays that way for long.