Bonnie Jones

Bonnie Jones premieres samesame, a multichannel electronic music, sonic counter-narrative. Using field recordings, circuit-bent electronics, samples, and historical recordings, samesame considers how the specificities of our individual experience and perception of the world are reflected and refracted within geopolitical and historical conditions.

Bonnie Han Jones (b.1977) is an Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work is iterative, multidisciplinary, and typically involves building concepts through research and study and then moving these ideas through a variety of different mediums, methods, and forms. She uses electronic music, recorded sound materials, text, video, performance, and score with attention and focus on listening and improvisation as a core theme and generative method. The work broadly explores noise, sonic identity, listening as thinking and sound as knowledge.

She performs both solo and in a wide range of collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Jones was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and has been a board member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, with Suzanne Thorpe, she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops focused on technology-based art making, improvisation, and community collaboration.

Jones has received commissions from the ICA, London, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and has presented her work widely throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, Jones was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore and Providence.

Presented in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Monochrome Multitudes

Workshop: In this informal session, Bonnie Jones and participants consider her Lampo Folio score, Tetraphobia: a ritual for a now. She asks you to remember and briefly perform a sound from childhood. If you can’t attend in person, perform your sound for Bonnie by calling (845) 445-7587. Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #826. Sunday, December 11, 12 p.m.–12:30 p.m.