Locust Jones | MAGIC SAUCE Thursday, 1 June 20235:00 pm - Sunday, 2 July 20235:00 pm DRAW Space31A Enmore Road, Newtown NSW 2042
What is in Magic Sauce? The potent and portentous title of Locust Jones’ inaugural exhibition at DRAW Space in Newtown is blunt and wide open to innuendo. In his own words, his is a practice centred around a maelstrom: the depiction of a world slowly going to hell. Mired in the looping language and frenzied imagery of endlessly cycling news production and consumption, the artist wades across viscous outpourings of current affairs and his response? Why, to spray it back, in personal translation, across multiple mediums. With drawing sticks in hand, bodily, and audibly, his response to the daily news is multifaceted but also recognisably idiomatic. Accompanied by his own vocal patter and to the rhythm of drumming by Tim Bruniges, through drawings to be made in situ across papered walls and surfaces, Magic Sauce will be a work of many ingredients. It promises to be part drawing, part performance and once over, part echoing residue of what came before. Based on previous drawing-as-performances, this one will be a cry out loud, largescaled, prophetic, sometimes despairing, occasionally awkward, but always bristling with furious energy. This time, with a focus on drawing and drumming, Jones aspires to create a space of counterpoint within the drama. As he describes it, this performance will be a turn towards the primacy and intimacy of drawing as a means of clearing the slate, of purging the toxicity of negative news. Jones’ work is already expressive; suggesting both visceral and cerebral responses to the phenomenon of the daily, hourly, to the minute news, and the performative aspect, with minimal elements, only serves to sharpen the impact of expression.