At the Hugh Lane Museum of Modern Art, Jesse Jones has an exhibit entitled No More Fun and Games. NMFG intends “to redress and renegotiate omissions in the historical canon of art.” This presentation is not a static piece, as we might assume of other pieces of art. Instead, Jones creates a dynamic experience for on-lookers. Her project seems to deal with minimalist ideas concerning the negative space of female representation in canonized art.

At first, the exhibition is confusing. The front desk of the show opens into a small room and then a large, white room. Jones includes speakers that play soft, soothing music, mounted on stands that face in all directions create an erratic pattern throughout the room. The huge walls, white and bare, create an eerie feeling of absence. After all, an art show should have drawings, photos, or paintings on the wall, right? The white room gives way to a room that has silver walls, reminiscent of aluminum foil or the industrial freezers we might see at a restaurant. In this room, Jones includes a few paintings, but still the inclusion is minimal.

Jones drags a floor-to-ceiling piece of cloth attached to a track overhead. It provides the image of woman’s arm and hand. I stand in the room and wait to see the impression it casts into the large white room. The cloth overlays the feminine over the represented absence of the empty walls. The experience moves me. Jones seems to be arguing that the work of women colors all art, even in places that may not seem to contain such art. She also creates a stark contrast between the blank walls of the white room and the obscurely reflective walls of the silver room, the first containing no art and the second housing only a few pieces.

The underrepresented nature of minority artists in cultural canons comes into focus through the work of Jones. As we discuss the importance of women in the politics surround Irish independent, we still understand how women are subtracted from the general discussion.