April 25-30, 2020

William E. Jones and Mark Flores
Untitled

2020
dimensions variable
video/installation/performance

Image Credit : Matthew Carson

STATEMENT:

I hate “performative.” It’s a word I’d like to leave behind in the ’teens and not use at all in the ’twenties. But here I am, like some kind of douchebag, doing a performance for a gallery. As if they’re clairvoyants, Finn and Rachel asked my boyfriend, Mark Flores, and I to do a performance via Skype (or FaceTime or that malware Zoom) awhile back. At the time, I wondered what we could do, but now I realize that we will be doing the only thing we can do during these days of “sheltering in place.” In a recent article, Art in America called us “roommate artists”—a euphemism I hadn’t encountered in this century—but I suppose it’s true, we are roommates, and we have spent almost every hour since the end of February together in our apartment. And we haven’t killed each other!

Since I am no longer able to visit the barber, Mark has very kindly agreed to give me a haircut and beard trim. Why not do this on camera for the enjoyment of folks in another state? No masks will be worn during the performance, but we suggest spectators wear masks while they are out in public.

BIOS:

William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Canton, Ohio, in 1962 and currently living in Los Angeles. He received a B. A. from Yale University in 1985 and an M. F. A. from Cal Arts in 1990. Jones’s films have been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. His work was included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials and the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is the author of several books, including Halsted Plays Himself (2011), True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016), and the novel I’m Open to Anything (2019). He has written for periodicals such as Artforum, Bidoun, Frieze, Mousse, Osmos, and the White Review. Jones has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Grant, and a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant. He lives in Los Angeles.

Mark Flores is an artist born in Ventura, California, in 1970. He received a B. A. from UCLA in 1999 and an M. F. A. from Cal Arts in 2002. Flores has had solo exhibitions at UCLA Hammer Museum; Alison Jacques Gallery, London; Cardi Black Box, Milan; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, California; California State University, Los Angeles; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; and the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, California. He has recently had two-person exhibitions with his partner William E. Jones at Nothing Special, Los Angeles; and Private Places, Portland, Oregon. Reviews and articles about Flores’s work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, the Los Angeles Times, Frieze, and the New York Times. Flores has received a California Community Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles.