William E. Jones
Lecture & Screening
May 18, 2016–May 18, 2016The Breeder, Athens
The Breeder is pleased to host William E. Jones, one of LA’s leading independent filmmakers, on May 18, 2016 , on a screening event where Jones will discuss his current obsessions and present a selection of his films.
William E. Jones’ films often circulate in the context of museum and gallery exhibitions. His highly emotive body of work, predominantly deals with the deconstruction of artifice and façade in found footage; and has included gay pornography from post-Soviet states (The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography), homophobic police training footage (Tearoom), and Cold War propaganda (Berlin Flash Frames). His finds trigger the creation of experimental videos, documentaries, installations, artistic books and curated programs.
William E. Jones was borned in Canton, Ohio and now lives in Lon Angeles. He graduated from Yale University and in 1990 he received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award; videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998); the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004). He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005; at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010; at the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, in 2011.
Jones has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Grant, and a California Community Foundation Fellowship and lastly from the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to prepare a book about Alexandros Iolas. He is the author of numerous books, including Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), Imitation of Christ,, which was named one of the best photo books of 2013 by Time magazine, Flesh and the Cosmos (2014), and the recently published True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell.
