Biography

Octavious Jones received his DEC from Dawson College where he studied Cinema, Video & Communications from 2015-17. During these years, Jones developed ideas around game design, animation and other digital mediums. When graduation approached, Octavious considered all the art that he had made at Dawson and concluded that his most important work had escaped the screen.

    

Octavious majored in Sculpture at Concordia University where he received his BFA in 2022. In his opening year, Octavious created the first Amphibious Readymade Creature as a way of providing an absurd experience of nature. This project became the grandfather to an array of aquatic artworks.  Jones then explored his absurd ambitions with acrylic plexiglass by building a boat shaped aquarium on wheels. Water remains a dominant theme in the many projects of Octavious Jones. Water is a product of its environment; both predictable and uncertain. Water gives life but can equally take it. Water is everywhere and it demands respect. Whether it be the fountain or the magnets in ice, the water serves as a metaphor for the many forms of Jones.

The art of Octavious Jones comes in many materials; built in multiple shops. Octavious has experience carving wooden boats although he began sawing toys.

In the beginning, the focus was a sense of 3D space. As a result, Jones spent most of his time with tools.

The grandfather of Octavious Jones has always painted and so it is no coincidence that the brush found its way into the hand of Jones.

    

Beginning in 2018, Jones studied painting under Daniel Oxeley and Joseph Siddiqi. The first paintings were flat and simple. Octavious was not truly a painter until Dan suggested tape and Les Plastciens. Jones created some conceptual paintings for Dan before discovering a more controlled composition. Jones’ paintings remained sharp and simple to embrace the plasticiens philosophy. The idea was that the paintings should be easy to understand. The viewer’s eye should not travel so that they can experience the relationship between the colours all at once, leading to a subjective reaction. 

    

In the following year, Octavious Jones began a long investigation into Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys and other Bauhaus artists. Jones was influenced by ideas of informel, Fluxus, Automatism as well as a few other movements. All of these ideas lead to messier paintings.

  

 In 2020, Jones began to reject the idea that the viewer’s eye should not travel. Octavious wanted his paintings to offer intricate details. These new paintings aimed to offer the same type of subjective experience as the previous works, however they will not be limited to a single set of situational colour relationships. A viewer can focus their reaction on a certain section or multiple sections in a sort of narrative. The possibilities become endless when the painting provides thousands of micro relationships for us to react to. 

 

The parallel lines & shapes provide the people with structure and therefore an easier understanding of a certain section. The abstraction of Octavious Jones can be overwhelming and therefore hard to digest. As a result, Octavious offers shapes as space to breath; allowing people to make mental maps. People will anchor to a specific shape and their eyes will travel from there. When the viewer’s eye feels lost or overwhelmed, there will always be a specific section for them to retreat to.

    Under the advice of Joseph Siddiqi, Jones developed his abstract paintings while reading the ideas of Josef Albers, Mary Corse, Al Held, John Sloan, André Breton, Edmund Burke as well as a few others. While learning from Joseph Siddiqi, Octavious’ mission was to find the balance between control & chaos.  Joseph had experience working with shapes as well as abstract compositions, making him the ideal mentor for Jones. Siddiqi’s words lead Jones to consider transparency. These next paintings were experiments in how colours sit on top/below each other. Joseph instructed Octavious to play with various types of paints & mediums to understand how certain colours show under another while some colours lay opaque at the surface. 

    

Now combining all of these influences, Octavious performs gestural automatic strokes while considering the shapes & transparency to compose balanced yet complex canvases.

    

After a while of water and paint, the art of Octavious Jones began to show signs of other natural forces. There is something about magnets. Kelly Jazvac started a discussion around “looking versus seeing” which lead Jones to freeze magnets in ice. Kelly’s idea was about providing the people with the opportunity to get closer and spend more time with our art. Octavious’ interpretation was about a delayed experience. Jones’ experiments became about something where people could predict what will happen but they are forced to stay to see how it happens. By freezing multiple magnets in ice, we know the magnets will find each other eventually, but how and when remain a mystery.