Member Spotlight: Tacie Jones

Elsa Lamere
Who are you and where are you currently?

Tacie Jones
I'm Tacie Jones, and I am currently living in Huntington, West Virginia, right on the Ohio River on the west side of the state. I teach at Marshall University, and I am going into my 4th year here as the assistant professor of New Media. I wear a lot of hats with that title. There is never a dull moment, its fun.

Elsa Lamere
It can be nice always having something to do.

Tacie Jones
Yeah, yeah, a lot of different curricular areas too. There's only about one faculty for each area/discipline, so I'm the only person working in time-based/ new media. But it's good. I really enjoy the students.

Elsa Lamere
How long have you been teaching for?

Tacie Jones
I've been teaching for a long time in a lot of different capacities. My first job teaching was in a residential treatment facility when I was around 25 years old. I started an art program there. After that, I taught a lot in community art settings. I had a nonprofit that I started where we worked with an underserved community in Giles County, Virginia. I was living there for about 10 years. I started teaching college-level when I was doing my PhD at Virginia Tech. So that's been since 2018 only, but many, many years of other forms of teaching with all different ages and groups of people and demographics.

Elsa Lamere
Would you say college is your favorite to teach?

Tacie Jones
Yeah, it's what I always wanted to do way back when I was an undergrad studying painting. I knew I wanted to be a professor, and I wanted to be in that world that’s created through art schools because it was where I felt like I belonged, especially with other creative people.

Elsa Lamere
Absolutely feel that. So, your undergrad was painting. What brought you to new media?

Tacie Jones
It's been a long winding journey. I've always been interested in moving image and installation. I basically lived in the sculpture studio, even though I was a painting concentration, and I remember doing this one piece where I built two walls closing in a corner. It was probably a 4-by-6-foot enclosure where I built a glass 6-pane or 8-pane window that you could look into. You could look in to see an old armchair and an old CRT that was playing static. I've always been really interested in performance art, installation, and conceptual art in general. I was interested in Joseph Beuys and in those strange, evocative things that make you think and ask questions. So that is probably going to lead into another question about why I'm into new media…

Elsa Lamere
Yeah, please go into it if you want to.

Tacie Jones
New media creates such an interesting space because you're thinking about and working with time, and often other sensory components, like sound. Memory is one of the biggest topics in my research, and it opens up an investigation of time and memory that allows you to reframe things, which is interesting and questions embodiment. So all of that, but doing it in a way that makes you think and feel in very close proximity to each other, if not at the same time, because it's very hard to do that. It's hard for us to think and feel at the same time. We tend to be one or the other at any given time, you know? So, I'm interested in bringing those two things together because I'm really interested in how we can explore embodied presence. Time-based and new media are forms that are very impermanent and give us space to do that in new and interesting ways.

Elsa Lamere
Yeah, I love that. I've done some work where I focused on themes like that, about memory and interconnectedness, too. It's so cool.

Tacie Jones
Yeah, there's so much, right? Because we're just carrying so much memory in our bodies and our minds. We're kind of consumed by it, which is interesting to think about. There's so much potential to explore it and see how it's a space to connect with other people through creative practice.

Elsa Lamere
I agree. I'm curious about your current projects; what have you been working on recently?

Tacie Jones
It’s kind of weird because I do a lot of different things, like I was saying with my teaching, but also my practice is very multifaceted, and I think many people who work in new media and time-based forms are that way. It's not a singular thing we do. My work comes together in large scale multimedia installation projects that involve a lot of video and material elements.
My ideas are often very embodied in some way as a starting point; then I do a lot of projection mapping and figuring out sound. I'll often start with a video performance project, and then I'll think about and mind map from there to create other components that tie back and relate to it. Over time it slowly becomes a bigger thing, with all these different elements. It takes quite a lot of work to get something like that fully realized.
I feel like my work used to be sort of edgy and more about the hard stuff, but now I think my work is largely related to my own spiritual practice and healing work. My spiritual ideology aligns with Zen Buddhism in a lot of ways. So now it’s not so much about looking at the hard things, but about being present in experiencing. Specifically, the memory of light is really interesting to me. So while the work is about grief, it's more closely about interconnectivity. After talking to some people who have seen and been immersed in my recent work entitled The Origin Of Love And All The Remains, they told me it felt like they were being transported back to their childhood. This feeling was created through the use of light, how some objects were loosely gestured at in imagery, through the sound of heat bugs, crickets, grasshoppers, water, and all of these very sensory things. It's meant to make you feel whatever you need to feel very deeply, and I think this project was really successful in that way. But also, it’s about getting out of the story in our heads and feeling the thing instead of having to know what it means.
The Origin Of Love And All The Remains, had some legs. The piece was up at the Arts, Letters, and Numbers program in Averill Park, New York last summer. It was also at a local arts collective here in Huntington called Hacks, and then it was at the Art Center of the Capital Region up in Troy, New York.

Elsa Lamere
Yeah, totally. That is so cool.

Tacie Jones
Thank you. Yeah, I really was happy with that project. I'm also working on something that is not finished yet that's called Gossamer Bodies that's going to be an installation next summer at one of the galleries here at Marshall in the Visual Arts Center. The project is still unfolding, but there is going to be a VR component with a kind of choose-your-own-adventure sensory experience. Hopefully there will be multiple VR headsets, but that will depend on what equipment we get here at Marshall, because we don't have a lot currently. It'll be inside a large-scale installation again, with material elements like draped fabric and projection-mapped video. The viewer will walk into an immersive environment and then get to enter headset immersive environment as well.

Elsa Lamere
That's so neat and exciting. Are there any other projects you would like to talk about?

Tacie Jones
I don't think so. I'm just trying to keep a balance with independent work and teaching. This summer I've been doing a lot of conceptualizing and chipping away at stuff, which has been good. I’m getting ready to start teaching again though.

Elsa Lamere
That’s nice that you've had some time this summer to concentrate on your own practice. It’s important, and not everyone gets that, I think.

Tacie Jones
Yeah, the big breaks we get are definitely one of the perks of academia, but it also takes quite a bit of time to recuperate from the semester because it's very demanding. But it's awesome and totally worth it.

Elsa Lamere
Yeah, agreed. And what brought you to the New Media Caucus? I know you are an officer now; what has that been like?

Tacie Jones
It's been great. I love everything that the New Media Caucus stands for, what we do, and how open and accessible the programming is. I knew about it when I was doing my MFA and my PhD at Virginia Tech. There were some folks I knew on the board, and they even hosted the New Media Caucus Symposium there The last time it happened, prior to the one earlier this year at ASU.
It was Zach Duer and Meredith Drum who I became colleagues with in a way. I became friends with Meredith and she knew that I had gotten the job at Marshall. They had opened up the co-chair position for the grant scholarships and finances at NMC, so they invited me, and it worked out really well. Now I work with Kim Lyle, who's the other co-chair, and we try to keep the lights on, so to speak, even though there aren't any except for these glowing things in front of us. Something that is really amazing about the New Media Caucus is that we can connect from all over the world, and we don't have to be in a physical space with each other, which allows for so many more people from all over to share ideas. It's a special organization.

Elsa Lamere
And is there anywhere else people can see your work physically or digitally right now?

Tacie Jones
Right now, I'm going to have something in the upcoming SECAC juried exhibition. I'll have the show next year here in Huntington. That's kind of it at the moment.
I'm doing a workshop at the New Orleans Film Festival in October, so that would be something upcoming that is kind of exciting.
My website is: taciejones.com