Mathew Jones
Mathew Jones | Australia b.1961 | About 1,000 copies of The New York Daily News on the day that became the Stonewall Riot copied by hand from microfilm records 1997 | 1075 copies of 104-page newspaper printed from hand-drawn originals | Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1999 | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist
The Hand, the Eye & the Heart | 1 October 2011 — 12 February 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
Mathew Jones’s installation comprises reprinted newspapers in which the artist has laboriously copied by hand every word, photograph and advertisement in the New York Daily News from 27June 1969. The date is significant: it reported the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland and preceded the Stonewall riots that occurred in the early hours of 28 June. That historical moment, when members of New York’s lesbian, gay and transgender communities physically fought back against homophobia and police brutality, was a defining moment in the modern gay rights movement in the United States, but rather than depicting the reverberations of the riot, instead Jones chronicles the portents and environment that manufactured the riot. In choosing to ‘miss’ this moment by a matter of hours, Jones’s work embodies anticipation, or prefiguration, resulting in the displacement of attention from Stonewall’s immense social and political significance.
