Cirque de Vice: Sideshow / City Gallery / July 8 – September 2, 2022
Artist Statement
Cirque de-Vice is a multi-part sculptural installation on intertwining themes of sin, carnival, and (over)indulgence. These selections from the installation, explore contemporary notions of sin and vice, with a particular emphasis on greed—in relation to a vice-loving, digitized world on the brink of socio/ecological disaster. Embodied by fin-de-siècle circus culture, animal-hybrid sculptural representations, this project reveals the dissonance, affect, disempowerment and angst lurking within manifestations of putative harmony and celebration. Its denizens are silently displayed and entertainingly decorated, yet also burdened by the selfish profit-seeking of others.
The digitally manipulated wall works the artist calls Spectators, are based on a collection of erotic porcelain dolls the artist found while doing research in Spain, all from one man’s private collection. These pink-toned, hairless, nipple-free objects radiate coded messages of class, race, and sex; of religious taboos and colonial projects; of dominance, obsession, and commodification.
This project was generously funded by an Arts NB Creation Grant.
Biography
Kim Vose Jones is a Fredericton-based installation artist. She has had many eclectic life experiences which fuel her art practice; from working at a family planning clinic on the Afghan-Pakistani border to visiting snow monkeys in Jigokudani Park, Japan. Her art research has taken her from the Prado in Madrid to the Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota to the salt gardens on Ile de Re, in France.
Vose Jones has exhibited internationally. She is the recipient of several ArtsNB Creation Grants, the Studio Watch Emerging Artist of the Year Award from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (2011).
Kim holds an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. She studied glass blowing and casting at Alfred University in upstate New York and earned a joint major BA in Women Studies and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal, where she graduated with distinction.
As well as being a practicing artist, Kim is an academic researcher, curator and educator. She has worked as an MFA Mentor for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the Fine Arts program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.