Residual Worlds: Artist Reception & Performance

Amos Eno Gallery invites you to join us to celebrate Residual Worlds, the solo exhibition from materials-based installation artist Samantha Jones, at the artist reception — plus, a special performance with Jones and guest artist Heather Lyon.

Transforming both the upper and lower levels of the gallery into an immersive installation of hand-painted silk and velvet, Jones invites visitors into spheres of life that may not know one another, yet are so deeply embedded that they cannot be severed, nor can they leave each other behind.

Within the installation, two color-drenched worlds emerge. One — a multivalent atmosphere — evokes the molecular swerve of the vital swarm, while the other — a textural, cave-like terrain — engulfs the visitor in its folds and fantasies. Haunting one another in intensity, palette, and mark, these become Residual Worlds: distinct yet inextricably shared, much like the worlds we inhabit every day. Moving through them, viewers become aware not only of the spaces themselves, but of their own presence within an ecology of relationships that is constantly unfolding.

Humans, as aliens to the many worlds we inhabit, live in a condition of absurdity, unable to fully know the residual traces we leave in the lives of others. Jones's installation asks what it means to become more attentive to those unseen connections at a moment when questions of ecological interdependence, collective care, and shared responsibility have become increasingly urgent. Residual Worlds grows out of Jones's ongoing research into "wild care" — an ethic that understands life not as isolated individuals, but as entangled systems of mutual influence, vulnerability, and persistence.

For Jones, residue is active material — that which is left behind, the remainder, what persists. It is the ooze between states, identities, and selves, forever in motion rather than fixed. It is the substance with which one must still reckon after its maker has departed: an active reminder of its own presence and of the life that brought it into being. To exist as a living being is to create residue — to participate in an ongoing persistence of being that continues beyond intention.

Art, too, is residue. It escapes the body of its maker and continues on its own trajectory as a new body, possessing a life beyond intention or design. Rather than illustrating philosophical ideas, Jones gives them material form. Silk and velvet become living surfaces whose color, translucency, and texture continually shift as visitors move through them, creating an environment that is completed through encounter.

Rooted in Jones's ongoing research into philosophy, aesthetics, and ecological thought, Residual Worlds offers an immersive meditation on the invisible systems that bind us to one another. Along with the residue of the co-creative happenings that will occur within it, the installation invites us to awaken ourselves to these overlooked worlds and to consider how we might care for them — and for one another — with greater attention.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Samantha Jones is a materials-based installation artist living in the coastal woods of Maine. She holds a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her dissertation, Wild Care: A Vital Surrealist Inquiry on Loss in the Wood, considers new and vital etho-ecologies within the philosophy of aesthetics. Jones is an adjunct assistant professor of art at the University of Maine, Orono. She has participated in residencies including the Wormfarm Institute (WI), Vermont Studio Center (VT), Pinea Linea De Costa (Rota, Spain), the International Center for the Arts (Monte Castello Di Vibio, Italy), and Fondation Lac o Le Mon (Lecce, Italy). She is represented by Amos Eno Gallery in New York.

ABOUT AMOS ENO GALLERY

Founded in 1974 in SoHo, Amos Eno Gallery has been a fixture of New York City's nonprofit arts community for more than fifty years. Now located on the Lower East Side, the gallery is operated by a community of professional artists from New York City and across the country, together with a part-time director.

The gallery is located at 191 Henry Street between Jefferson and Clinton Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It’s a 5 minute walk from the F Train’s East Broadway Station and a 10 minute walk from the J Train’s Delancey Street - Essex Street Station.

Amos Eno Gallery's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Our nonprofit, artist-run space is also supported through the generosity of the Joseph Roberts Foundation.