AERIAL MO(U)RNING
ASHLEY JUDE JONAS
5/16/25-6/21/25
Ashley Jude Jonas - finding myth or the feeling / the front,
Cyanotype, photographic imagery from the archive, found ephemera, 2025
The Weather Station is pleased to present Aerial Mo(u)rning, a solo exhibition by Ashley Jude Jonas. Aerial Mo(u)rning brings together a new body of work from this Dayton-based artist, whose incorporation of personal found objects merges with her ceramics and cyanotype collages to create a reflection on personal loss.
With Aerial Mo(u)rning, Ashley Jude Jonas references a time of day, the act of grief, and an airborne, floating vantage point taken on either. Although there are several ways to read this phrase, the artist is comfortable with each. Such excesses of meaning are characteristic of Jonas' work, which unites a range of technical processes alongside found materials - each bringing their own histories - to create artworks remaining open to multiple interpretations, all the while resisting closure.
In August of 2023, Jonas' father passed away in the Key West home he built and occupied for more than 50 years. In the weeks that followed, Jonas traveled to Florida to attend to the many tasks surrounding the death of a loved one, and began revisiting the Instax photographs she had made of her father’s home - several of which appear in this exhibition. Alongside these photographs, Jonas also returned to the small objects she had gathered from his house over the years without a clear sense of how - or if - they might find their way into her practice. Although the artist had moved away from Key West following high school, over the years her father's handmade home had become a place of great nourishment for her.
Instax photographs from the Key West, Florida home where Jonas' father lived
This bricolage - in which Jonas had spent much of her youth - impacted her profoundly. As her sensibilities developed, she found herself disassembling found objects only to reassemble them later in her studio, shifting the original function towards something more expressive, more personal. It wasn't until graduate school at the University of Colorado-Boulder that the consistencies between her father's home-building and her own studio practice became clear to her. "My father was a humble inventor out of necessity, a caretaker of objects out of a respect for them," she writes, "I am an artist. I do the things my father did. I problem solve the same way he did... I collect objects out of [an] empathy for them. I covet materials because I see their potential... [but] my intentions are to make art. I am an artist because I grew up trying to understand the logic that my father has embedded in his house.”*
*these quotes come from a 2013 essay by the artist, When all is Right
Ashley Jude Jonas - A Void : collect and descend, porcelain, glaze, gold leaf, collected objects collected
from father's house, dimensions variable. 2025.
This desire to understand his logic, as well as the mourning of his death, directly inform A Void : collect and descend, installed along the rear wall of the gallery. In each of these pieces, a small object Ashley took from his home (a coat hook, a wooden knob, a figurine of a horse) hangs suspended inside of a larger porcelain vessel, with an interior ringed in gold and a darkness impossibly deep. Although each is mass-produced, their unique surfaces, patinated by time and by use, create the idiosyncrasies of the personal. These aren't just objects, Jonas reminds us, these were things used and lived with - a record of a life and its weather. Holding each item are Jonas' porcelain pinched coil vessels - a different kind of record, this time of the artist's hand. In speaking about this series, Jonas refers to these pieces as portals- in viewing, we occupy one space while looking into another, although exactly where remains hidden from knowing.
Ashley Jude Jonas - L to R, details from A Void : collect and descend, with horse figurine, Jpaanese bowl, and wood with mushroom
In finding myth or the feeling, a collage series made from cyanotypes (among other materials), Jonas moves deeper into collaboration with place. Made through the reaction of light-sensitive chemistry and sunlight, Jonas' created her cyanotypes on-site in Key West, imprinting the light and shadow of her father's home and garden directly onto the paper. In each of these moving compositions, images of his house are set against ambient atmospheres made by the house itself, shifting in and out of focus, and punctuated by the layers of their many edges. Although each piece incorporates photographic imagery, these collages more faithfully capture the fugitive mysteries of how her father lived in an environment he built entirely himself, coupled with the grief surrounding his loss.
Ashley Jude Jonas - finding myth or the feeling / the shack in the back,
Cyanotype, photographic imagery from the archive, found ephemera, 2025
The more deeply Ashley invests in this work, the more she finds herself turning to weather metaphors to articulate her intentions. "I want to live life like weather," the artist says. In many ways, grief and weather are not unalike. Both are unpredictable, both ebb and flow, and both can also be environments - something which, like a vessel, can hold us and keep us present. For Jonas, it is this presentness, and a sense of being held that she desires most for her viewers. As she herself writes succinctly in a short text accompanying this exhibition, It's just / what / we are inside of / right / now / only.
For Aerial Mo(u)rning, Ashley Jude Jonas has collaborated with Two Steps Press to publish Magic Maker, an artist book that further explores the themes of Aerial Mo(u)rning, featuring more of the artists Instax photographs and writing. Copies of Magic Maker will be available for purchase during the opening reception, and during the run of this exhibition.
Ashley Jude Jonas’ work has been exhibited at Riffe Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; Undercurrent, Brooklyn; The Clay Studio, Philadelphia; and The Neon Heater, Findlay, Ohio; among other spaces. From 2014 to 2025, Jonas has co-directed and curated The Blue House, an alternative artist-run space operated within her home. Jonas has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BFA from University of Florida. She lives in Dayton, Ohio.