Q&A with Joseph Jones on the occasion of his exhibition at Adams and Ollman, March 14–April 11, 2026
Adams and Ollman: These paintings are small–some the size of a 5x7 photograph. Given that photography is your raw material, is that a coincidence? What does it mean to make a painting that fits in the same hand as its source?
Joseph Jones: The scale probably isn't a coincidence. A lot of the source images I work from are encountered on a phone– held in one hand, scrolled past, saved almost absentmindedly. So the scale in the paintings can be held, or at least imagined as something held, in a way that mirrors how the image first appears. It keeps a kind of intimacy intact. At the same time, the act of painting slows everything down. What was once glanced at becomes something you have to stay with. So the scale holds onto the casualness of the photograph, but the process contradicts it.
AO: The flowers in this show–a poppy, a rose, closely cropped and stripped of context–raise a question about cultivation and looking. We grow these things almost entirely to be seen. Do you think about that dependency?
JJ: With the flowers, I've been thinking a lot about how they're produced to be looked at. They're cultivated, bred, circulated–often detached from any environment that isn't oriented toward display. The images I find tend to reinforce that: tight crops, shallow depth of field, petals isolated against soft backgrounds. Painting them doesn't really return them to nature; if anything, it pushes them further into that condition of being-for-looking.
AO: Pink runs through the whole exhibition–flowers, birds, a sweatshirt, a hoodie. It's a colour with considerable cultural freight: tender, synthetic, commercially loaded. Did pink find you, or did you find pink?
JJ: Pink arrived gradually but then became difficult to avoid. It's a colour that already comes preloaded–with sentiment, with artificiality, with a kind of commercial sweetness–and I think that's part of why it's useful. It can carry those associations without me having to construct them from scratch. At the same time, when you stay with it, it starts to split. It can be synthetic and tender at once, decorative and slightly abject. So it's less that I chose pink as a theme and more that it kept reappearing across the images I was collecting, and once it was there, it began to organise things.
AO: Carolee Schneemann spent years documenting her cats kissing her–the same gesture, returned to again and again, accumulated into an archive. There's something in that about what repetition does to an image: it doesn't wear it out, it deepens it. You've built your own archive of thousands of images. Does obsessive return do something similar for you–and at what point does an image become yours?
JJ: I think repetition is where a lot of the meaning sits, for me. With Carolee Schneemann, the same gesture–kissing her cats–is returned to again and again, and it doesn't flatten out through that repetition; it actually accumulates something. Each instance is slightly different, and over time those differences start to matter.
I'm always starting with images that already exist, so they're never really mine at the beginning, but through spending time with them, they slowly change. An image starts to feel like mine when you can't trace it back to one source anymore–when it stands on its own but still carries bits of where it came from.
AO: Velázquez painted Philip IV's hunting dogs as though the dogs themselves had gravity–the same slow attention he gave to silk and armor. But those animals were also proxies for royal power; you couldn't separate the dog from what it said about the man who owned it. Your animals seem to have been freed from that kind of ownership–and yet they've entered another system entirely, one made of search results and image archives. Does that feel like a liberation, or just a different kind of captivity?
JJ: In Velázquez, the dog is always tethered to power, even when it's painted with care. The animals I work with are already detached from any single owner–not completely free, just a less obvious kind of containment. The paintings sit in that space: each image feels unique but also endlessly repeatable.