Kelly Kristin Jones: nwl

The Luminary
October 8 - December 10, 2022

nwl, co-curated in collaboration with The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), emerged from conversations between Stephanie Koch and Simon Wu, co-curator and Program Manager of TRII, reflecting on the role of white people in dismantling whiteness. Too often, we rely on the crucial work of non-white people to critique whiteness. How can white people dismantle white supremacy within themselves and their own communities, and how is whiteness visualized and how does it move through visual culture?

Kelly Kristin Jones (b. 1984) has, for the past five years, created work in photography, sculpture, and performance that reflects on white women's role in upholding and promoting white supremacy. By offering a more explicit diagnosis of the problem, she seeks to create space for alternatives. Exhibited for the first time in St. Louis, nwl brings together new and existing work by Jones that draws from various sites—the domestic, the monument, and the media—to explore how “nice white ladies” (or nwls) subconsciously uphold the aesthetics of white dominance, spatialize their supremacy, and place themselves in proximity to power.

In her Dodging Tool series, Jones began exploring how white women memorialize white supremacy through public monuments. Each black-and-white photograph features a blank, white geometric form that both conceals and highlights the underlying whiteness these monuments aim to preserve. The white form also resembles a dodging tool, used in photographic processes to lighten images, evoking the way photography helps to distribute and maintain flows of white power.

Jones continues this exploration with two new bodies of work. In the photographic series Untitled, she presents outlines of Grecian urns and shapes cut out over scenes lit by moonlight. In the installation Impulses of the Mob, cut-out images of white women’s hands are shown grasping various contested monuments, abstracting the parasitic and destructive relationship between white women and white supremacy.

For Jones, catalogs and magazine ads become a site for questioning the racial bias in photography and its role in reinforcing white femininity. A smiling blonde girl with a Mickey Mouse backpack, a sunset over a cotton field advertising a plantation wedding, a Greco-Roman column turned into an Urban Outfitters candle—enlarged to expose the dot pattern of the halftone process, Jones invites us to interrogate these seemingly innocuous images. Upon closer inspection, we notice the subtle visual cues of white supremacy. This subtlety allows white women to align themselves with white supremacy while denying their complicity in its promotion.

These image-based works complement Jones's sculptural project, A View from Home, which is built from neoclassical urns collected from suburban white women's homes. Classical forms have long echoed ideals of power and hierarchy, from the temples of ancient Greece and Rome to America’s capitals and plantations, and even suburban homes. This architectural tradition reaffirms whiteness as supreme power. A View from Home exaggerates the aesthetic of Grecian columns often found in domestic interiors, with stacked urn planters made of resin and fiberglass.

Through these works, Jones critiques the everyday ways whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in both public and private spaces, encouraging us to confront the systems that uphold these structures. By visualizing hidden power dynamics, nwl prompts viewers to reflect on their own roles within these spaces and consider how these systems might be dismantled. The exhibition challenges us to look beyond the familiar and question how space, memory, and power shape our lives—and how we might begin to reshape them.