Publications
Read on to see all the latest press mentions about the art of Mr. Jones.
"You can also visit the Collaborations page to see the different collaborative projects that Octavious has worked on. Check out the Galerie B page to learn about the curation by artistic marketing agency LNDMRK, where Octavious performed a series of live painting sessions on several surfaces, such as a bench, pillows, and an 8-foot canvas."
January 12, 2022
Jones agrees the Galerie B collaboration has been a great experience. “I’ve had opportunities presented to me as a result,” he says. “I’ve met a lot of people who are interested in my future work. This Galerie B project proves there are opportunities for us.”
- Montreal arts & culture journalist Richard Burnett
The Link at Sneakpeak
September 14, 2020
The event featured a creation station, where vendors had space to create clothing with custom details and sneakers with imitation animal parts.
If you wanted a sneaker nobody has, the vendors at the creation station could make you something nobody else will be rocking.
Octavious Jones creates paintings and customizable animal sneakers. In the past, Jones created a pair of animal-inspired, customized Jordans, with imitation crocodile legs and glue. People complimented his creation and it showed how simple art and sneakers combine to show a person’s individuality.
“I started making boats with legs two years ago, just by chance I had Crocs before a show and I had these legs, and I said fuck it and I put it on the Crocs, and people just loved it,” Jones said.
Jones does not have a hard price in mind when selling these modified sneakers or Crocs.
- Sam Boafo (The Link)
Debora's Essay
April 17, 2018
“And As I looked, it became very clear that this five -and -10 -cent ship was in someway connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.”
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Octavious finds his footing sailing through historical assemblage art references, with a boatload of objects(toy boats, dinosaur parts). In the Proto-surrealist book, Veridicus Christianus (1601, The Cost of Careless Looking) Charges human pretensions with carelessness. Jones' constructs are blind. Yet they do not sell into oblivion. There is no pretense. They amble care - free. Sometimes they congregate at or scale a fantastic whimsical, fountain.
The use of dismembered plastic dinosaurs tests our assumptions about conceit. Wholeness can be attained from otherness, challenging conventions. Octavious demonstrates the timelessness of distorted preconceptions. Disregarded, our universal human faults and assumptions are conveniently discounted to preserve our self image. Refuting self - importance, Jones' convoy infiltrates spaces unperturbedly , is decidedly Jaunty.
A lot of the Man Ray (Cadeau 1921) Uncanny moves throughout each work, “unheimlich” or “unhomely”, Unfamiliar entities construed from disparate parts collaged into another, being. The instability of change can be discomfiting. Often wobbling, like our perceptions of what must logically exist, Octavious navigates beyond the unhomely idea, a name often given to what is new, with his waggish ambulatory fleet. And because his creatures smack of Surrealism à la Dali’s playful provocation (lobster telephone 1936), Jones' disparate object parts come together to make a charming whole. His beasties, an array of vessels with extremities evoke (1930) Hans Bellmer’s use of doll legs constructs, the humanoid exchanged for dinosaur legs and tails, which makes each stranded boat mobile, walk it’s transfigured walk
The conjunction of landed nautical toys with dinosaur toy anatomy animates the inanimate, invigorates our buoyancy. His work embodies the flow of fiction through its wonder, sprouts blends of jubilation. Each witty absurdity is a metamorphosis, converts our rational minds. We believe.