Look with Your Ears

On June 10th, Oshawa, Ontario’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery opened the Aaron Jones solo exhibition, Fountain of Dreams. Bringing together video, Jones’s familiar medium of collage, photomural, and a multi-channel soundscape, the exhibition does important work of exploring how outside influences inform the Black and human psyche, while also disorienting our sense of self and space.

I first reviewed the work of Pickering-based artist Aaron Jones in 2020 as part of Scarborough’s multi-cite Three-Thirty experience (featuring artists Ebti Nabag and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, curated by Anique Jordan). Since then, there has been a pandemic, which forced us all to find ourselves closer to home and perhaps farther away from ourselves – our “normal” lives – than ever. As suggested in the title, Fountain of Dreams transposes our relationships with time and space into a meta-real experiment of displacement.

Located on the gallery’s first floor, I see and hear Jones’s work as soon as I enter the building. Taking a step into the room showcasing his work, audiences first encounter Noise I, a large digital collage/photomural featuring flocks of white-feathered geese in the background, and a mountain range in the foreground. There is no negative space in the collage; the entire canvass is taken up by these overlapping geese and the continuous mountains atop them. On the opposite wall are hung Noise II and Noise III. In all murals of the series the geese seem to be in flight, and the archipelago seems very still. It felt to me as though walking between Noise I to Noise III, there was very little difference among the murals. It was very easy to believe I was seeing three of the same image, receiving three of the same message. And that message was the disorienting experience of expecting the loudness of a flock of birds in various stages of flight, the sense of being outdoors, and perhaps instinctually flexing to duck, but the squawk of the birds never comes. Instead, audiences hear the tones coming from a directional speaker: ambient noise, but if you stand directly under it, the sounds change based on you, the human, as stimuli. There is also a speaker set low on the far wall, playing the recording Aaron Jones captured on his phone while standing outside.

The sounds are different each time you take another glance, staring to find the similarities and differences, and that experience is contemplative. It is not musical, rather it is an unpredictable clash with no mappable steps. It is sound, and that sound is meant to alter your thoughts and expectations.

In an interview with Aaron Jones himself, the artist explains that his dream for Black people is for us “not to rely on other nations of people, for Black people to exist independently. Many nations have that agency. That’d be nice.” This element comes through as he goes on to explain that his intention for this exhibition is for people to slow down and “be in themselves more.” Jones is preoccupied with spirituality and technology, both of which have extensions “beyond the body.”

According to Erin Szikora, an Associate Curator of Exhibitions, “I see Noise I, II, and III as three parts of a series. Playing with different fragments of the same image, they become extensions of one another – used in the exhibition as a background to an understanding of space as fragmented and sometimes imaginary.”

Here my mind wanders to the work of Dr. Ola Mohammed, who lives and works in Ontario. In her thesis she explains how Blackness is coded as excess, and how the word “noise” has Latin roots to “nausea” and of being unpleasant. She writes “Black noise makes white sound possible,” foregrounding earlier the importance of looking into how we might “…generate new ways of thinking about what Black sonic practices allow us to register of our social and political worlds.” From Black people I expect music. Birds are also described as having song. But here, the white geese come to signify this unpleasant Black noise, all the while seemingly repeating images displace and disquiet our experience of sound. Immersed and disoriented, audiences must not listen with their eyes but look with their ears, a contrapuntal exercise.

A 90-degree turn away from Noise III is Wandering, a digital video that has a run time of one hour and 47 seconds. It is displayed across four connected screens, intended to create the façade of being inside, looking out a window. The sound is almost diegetic, as though Jones were also hearing the same sounds within the visual as the audience hears while observing. The film is of Jones in the winter climates of Ontario. Snow on the ground. Leaves missing from the deciduous trees on the right, but with the rebirth represented by the green of coniferous trees on the far left. Jones is wrapped in what appears to be several thermal blankets affixed together, as he struggles, or dances, or floats, or haunts, in the reflective silver sheath. I found myself constantly careening to see his face, for a hint of his state of mind, if he was okay, a clue as to what to feel. The film is played slightly slowed down and as though it were being rewound, purposefully off-synch, so the snow falls upwards, and Jones’s movements seem unnatural (they do not flow rhythmically, but in a jagged, contorted way). This makes the experience a meta collage of performance art, sonic art, visual art, and filmmaking.

A through line of the exhibition is the idea – construction and deconstruction – of ambiance. Having worked alongside Aaron Jones to put the exhibition together, Szikora says “Aaron selected a muted melon green [for the paint colour on the walls of his solo exhibition] to create a calm, restful environment. I believe this colour further distorts the viewer’s perception of the indoors/outdoor, summer/winter, lush/desolate dualism present throughout the exhibition space.”

Standing under the directional speaker, there is a slight melody from a theremin, an electronic musical instrument that is played without touch. Previously known as an etherphone, I can sense why Jones chose to include this instrument in his work. Played by thereminists moving one hand to control the sound’s frequency and the other to control the sound’s volume. Playing the instrument makes the thereminist appear as somewhat of a conductor, at least in their hand movements. This reminds me of how one might move in nature, to direct or guide wind to help start a fire, or to steer a sailboat. The wind sounds remind me also of how air dances on trees to make the forest and jungle sounds that are both menacing and calming. A sublime experience, to say the least. The music of the theremin is added to the ambient sounds of the forest, but that recording is a different length than the timing of the film, which is a different length still of the sound coming from the small speaker near the floor on the opposite wall. Because of these three different timings, they will never be in synch, they will never create a loop all together, and the audience will never have the same experience twice.

Jones mentions that his ideology, both with this exhibition and his prior work with Three-Thirty is for audiences to see, know, and feel that “Black people can do anything.” He says “asking questions makes those opportunities arise. Opportunities don’t arise if our mind’s not even preeing those opportunities.” There is so much in our creativity that transports us to alternative possibilities, and that work is both contained and expansive.

On the perpendicular wall there is another collage, Cliffside. It features cool colours, which juxtapose the warm colours of Noise III hung on the opposite wall. Cliffside could double as an underwater scene. It is so blue, each sheet printed and pasted on its plywood canvass as to make it appear deliberately pixilated; a throwback to early digital technology—another juxtaposition to the sleek editing of the Wandering video still within view. The cliff is the Scarborough Bluffs, the eroding natural icon on the Toronto suburb and lakefront lookout. The desert cactus in the middle of the winterized Bluffs is out of place. A disorientation that leads us into dreaming, speculative fiction, and contemplation about the state of our planet – or the planets, as Earth does not feel like Earth. Dr. Mohammed quotes Marina Peterson as she writes “noise composes atmospheric sensibilities…it amplifies ways of thinking and sensing the atmospheric.” The windy booms shake out of the speaker and, more than once, force patrons to look toward the gallery’s glass doors, looking outside to see if the storm was overhead or of it had started raining. The sensory disorientation and displacement of inside and outside continued.

Szikora explains “To me, Cliffside grounds the exhibition in a neither here nor there location. It is the photo mural that to me feels most rooted in the bluffs, but playing with the orientation of images, disorients the viewer. Am I looking at a cliff? Am I looking into water? I know I am somewhere along the shoreline, but I can’t locate myself exactly.”