Rachel Jones: A Sovereign Mouth

Review By Molly Cranston

In A Sovereign Mouth, her first solo exhibition in the US, currently on view at 12.26 Gallery, Rachel Jones has created a body of work that explores Black interiority and aliveness, as discussed in Ladi’Sasha Jones’ essay ‘A Grammar for Black Interior Art’. In her bodily way, Jones configures tactile and abstracted imagery of teeth and lips to consider the importance of inner life (“deep thought, affect, and resonance”) and the sensation and possibility of internal spaces.

“The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.” – Kevin Quashie

Here, Jones nimbly oscillates between the quiet and the cacophonous. Some pieces are small and searching, demanding close attention with canyons of wall space between them. But within the rough-edged works entire worlds unfold: Fiery rivers with their pink and blue fossilised beds, yellow light shivering liquidly in purple. Brown Mountains and red cliffs masticated together, creating bright and sticky mouth-scapes rendered in unruly oil stick and pastel. 

Jones has formed a visual language of, but not from, the mouth to further study representations of Blackness. The mouth is sovereign in that it is the threshold to the internal. The interior is communicated or protected by what mouths will and won’t do. Quiet or public, withholding or giving, speaking, kissing, crushing, swallowing. The only way inside is through the mouth and its passages. 

At each piece, I wonder which side of the lips we’re on. On occasion glimpsing tooth enamel as though through wet darkness, and at others, teeth peep shiny behind a lipstick smirk. Jones holds us in moments before and after crossing the threshold into the interior world.  A Sovereign Mouth is on view until December 19th in Dallas at 12.26 Gallery.

A Sovereign Mouth, 2020
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
72 1/2h x 100 2/3w in

A Sovereign Mouth, 2020
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
5 1/3h x 12 1/4w in

A Sovereign Mouth, 2020
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas 5 3/4h x 16 1/2w in

A Sovereign Mouth, 2020
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas 5 3/4h x 12 1/4w in