Overduin & Co. is pleased to present the exhibition, “Sans Soleil,” by Poppy Jones.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1983 experimental film by French writer and director Chris Marker. The film is described as a meditation on the nature of human memory, while Marker himself has declared the film nothing more than “a home movie.” At its start the film’s narrator recounts, “I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me."

Throughout her work, Jones’ imagery captures an intensity in life’s ordinary moments. Images are rendered in oil and watercolor on suede and silk. These pictures document the pathos of everyday objects, recording fleeting moments of domestic life: flowers collected from the garden, sunlight dappled across the walls of a room, shadows falling on the pages of a book, a lone balloon caught at the ceiling. One work in the exhibition titled “Clock” depicts a dandelion clipped and lying flat like a specimen in a lab. The bloom signals the start of a regenerative cycle.

Intimate in scale, each piece layers the hand-painted with lithography and photography on found textiles, including swatches from the artists own clothing. One of the first pieces in this body of work captures an image of buttons running along the front of Jones’ suede jacket. The picture is rendered on a stretched segment of the jacket itself, collapsing the image and its support. The fingerprints caught in the photographic image and actual prints embedded in the suede are indistinguishable.

While much of Jones’ imagery is taken from within her family’s home and garden, some photographs are taken during visits to historical spaces such as Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and Charleston House in Lewes, where gatherings of the Bloomsbury Group took place only a few miles from the artist’s home and studio.

Jones’ work draws on modernist literature and cinema, particularly Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's writings on objects and the material world, creating their own reality without time or plot. One work in the exhibition depicts a bottle and a vase in muted sepia tones on a suede surface. The Morandi-like mise-en-scène focuses on the illuminated glassy surfaces of the vessels. The piece is titled, “Transparent Things,” a reference to one of Nabokov’s final novels, also a reflection on memory.

Depictions of pages from books and journals figure heavily in Jones’ lexicon, another structure for the collection of images. A group of works in the show present illustrations of stone sculptures from the pages of the 1943 tome, Sculpture Today in Great Britain. In Jones’ renderings from the book, the black and white pages are awash in bright blue ink.

Jones’ recurring images often recall film stills, with some pictures tracing the arc of a flower’s form over time. While most works are more or less monochromatic, some pieces break with this structure, layering color into the image. “Still Life” depicts a glass of water set on a table, all in cool blue tones aside from two bright red cherry tomatoes lying on a white tablecloth. This overlay of color in areas within these monochromatic images brings to mind early film colorization in cinema, an attempt to make black and white footage appear more “real.”

As we move through Marker’s film, “Sans Soleil’s” narrator relays, “I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility… A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”