Barrie Jones Berlin 2016 # 9519 Framed Artwork

Statement About the Work
Barrie Jones’ art practice focuses on the human figure as a site of complex personal and collective identities, and on the urban environment and its many intersecting layers of social, economic and personal histories. Engaged with what Jones calls social studies, his pictures expose multiple economic, political, and social arrangements. Berlin Project 1945-2019 is a series of images showing the damage, some repaired, some not, inflicted on older buildings during the Battle of Berlin in 1945. The ubiquitous evidence of that gruesome urban battle functions as a violent reminder, though largely ignored, of a specific social history and of other, ongoing urban conflicts. Simultaneously, the images become formalist compositions of grids, textures and subtle colours, ignoring time, disassociated from their history, blending with their environment.

Bio
Jones has long been associated with Vancouver and the University of British Columbia, where he received his BFA, before spending several years in Ontario, where he received his MFA at York. He taught at York University before returning to British Columbia in the mid 90's where he was an instructor in photography at the University of British Columbia until 2021. In 2017, he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Art.

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