Currently on view at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles is “Heraclitus Fragment 124, Automatically Illustrated,” an exhibition of new work by William E. Jones. Over the course of more than two decades, William E. Jones has created films, videos, photographs, prints and texts that reorganize and recontextualize archival materials of all kinds. He combines research with formal experimentation, revealing the passions and sublimated political forces at work in documents of the state, forgotten or overlooked popular media, and official (and unofficial) visual histories. “Heraclitus Fragment 124, Automatically Illustrated” is the latest of Jones’s projects in which he mines the aleatory possibilities of the Internet to assign imagery to existing literary texts. For the first time, however, he turns to an ancient source: a single, one-line fragment by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC).

The most beautiful world, as Heraclitus says, is like rubbish scattered at random., 2013, (detail) archival solvent ink on paper, 32 x 37.33 inches (81.3 x 94.8 cm), unique.
Courtesy of David Kordansky.

“Heraclitus Fragment 124, Automatically Illustrated” is on view through February 22nd, 2014.

For more information visit David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.