The Intimate Infinite
Tomiko Jones: The Intimate Infinite
Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University of Denver
965 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO 80204
January 3–March 22, 2025
Curated by Cecily Cullen
Admission: free
Review by Maggie Sava
The Intimate Infinite, the mid-career survey of artist Tomiko Jones’ work over the past two decades, is currently on display at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. In this sizable exhibition spanning nine separate bodies of work, Jones navigates slow and earnest photographic meditations through the skillful application of aesthetic attention and process.
An installation view of Tomiko Jones’ exhibition The Intimate Infinite at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Image by Maggie Sava.
The exhibition opens with a close examination of space in Rattlesnake Lake, a series of photographs taken at the namesake location between 2000 and 2013. The images have a ghostly and liminal quality to them, accentuated by Jones’ play with focus, the recurrence of fog, skeletal tree stumps, and blurry, obscured human figures that Jones uses to portray spirit. [1]
Tomiko Jones, Rattlesnake Lake 5-8, series, 2000-2013, platinotype (palladium platinum print) from scanned 4x5 film negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
Digging deeper into these images reveals another force haunting the landscapes. Jones explains in her artist statement that this lake is an Indigenous site, but settlers cleared the land to build a town—one that eventually flooded. The tension between presence and disappearance is embedded within these histories of colonization and displacement, from the forced removal of people and culture to the need to possess and control the land, which leads to harmful environmental practices that destroy local flora. In turn, natural disasters wipe out human construction.
Tomiko Jones, Rattlesnake Lake 2, series, 2000-2013, platinotype (palladium platinum print) from scanned 4x5 film negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
Jones further solidifies this tension by choosing to make these images with a camera that resembles the equipment employed by the surveyors who photographed the land to support efforts of westward expansion. [2] Material, process, and subject are inseparable, as Jones literally uses the land to develop the images, processing the film with water from the lake and scarring it by rubbing dirt and leaves into it. [3]
Tomiko Jones, Chair, 2010, printed in 2024, piezography print on Photo Rag Baryta from scanned 120 negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
Tomiko Jones, Obaasan, Portrait of a Bride, 2010, printed in 2024, piezography print on Photo Rag Baryta from scanned 120 negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
The flow through the next two sections of the show, Passage (1989-2010) and Hatsubon (2016), is shaped by the exploration of grief. In Passage, Jones captures the physical evidence of people, family history, and relationships, as a means of coping with the death of her grandmother. Acting as both a series of artworks and a catalog of familial/familiar objects, images like Chair (2010, printed 2024) simultaneously honor the transience of life and push up against it. In this portrait defined by absence, the specificity and solidity of this piece of furniture—well-loved as evidenced by the colorful quilt on the seat and a knitted pillow resting against the arm—acts as an outline to its sitter’s form, making its emptiness all the more palpable.
An installation view of Hatsubon (2016) in the exhibition Tomiko Jones: The Intimate Infinite at the Center for Visual Art. Image by Maggie Sava.
Hatsubon continues to grapple with the “dualities of the fleeting and the lasting, the ephemeral and the corporeal, and the pendulous state between longing and release,” through Jones’ representation of the Japanese Buddhist ceremony of the same name performed in honor of her late father. [4] Carrying forward themes from Passage, Jones invites us into a more spiritual space in these works by fusing the act of photography and ritual.
Tomiko Jones, Urn at the Monongahela River (diptych), 2016, piezography print on Photo Rag Baryta from scanned 4x5 negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
Hatsubon depicts Jones’ active processing of her father’s death, not just in the way she shows this cultural custom but also in the deep reflection and reverence she imbues in these works. In the left-hand photograph of Urn at the Monongahela River (diptych) (2016), Jones places an urn on the river’s surface. In the right-hand image, the urn sits alone, floating on the water. The latter evokes the boundary between realms, the earthly suggested by the leaves in the top right corner and the otherworldly balancing it in the shadowy reflections on the bottom left. The vessel begins its movement into the shadows, both symbolizing and enacting a journey of the afterlife which Jones is helping to facilitate.
Tomiko Jones, Fall, 2016, archival pigment print on silk from scanned 4x5 film negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
Curator Cecily Cullen’s careful thematic considerations and the gallery team’s intentionality behind the exhibition design stand out in Hatsubon. Works printed on translucent silk are hung mid-air, allowing you to circle them, see their images in reverse, and observe how the other works shift in relation to how you position your body around them. The way you experience the story being told through these images is changeable and fluid, like the non-linear and overlapping experiences of grief and the ethereal nature of ceremony.
An installation view of Tomiko Jones’ exhibition The Intimate Infinite at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Image by Maggie Sava.
While Hatsubon underscores a transition of being, These Grand Places: Imagining National Belonging in American Landscapes (2017–present) emphasizes another prevalent theme in Jones’ practice: the exploration of process and documentation as an act of witnessing in the context of environmental and social justice. This version of These Grand Places is being exhibited in full for the first time in The Intimate Infinite, so it is unsurprising that it is the largest body of work on display.
A detail view of Tomiko Jones, Field Notes, assembled in 2024, table display with ephemera. Image by Maggie Sava.
The idea for this series began when many public lands were proposed for de-regulation during the previous Trump administration—lands that Jones visited with her family in her youth. [5] She set out to document those sites using her “mobile research studio (MRS),” a trailer that serves as both vehicle and workspace. [6] Jones visualizes her research process in Field Notes (assembled in 2024), a display composed of ephemera from her work in the MRS.
Tomiko Jones, Field Notes (the MRS), 2021, printed 2024, archival pigment print on Photo Rag Baryta. Field Notes (the MRS), 2021, printed 2024, handwritten text on rag. Image by Maggie Sava.
The political urgency of Jones’ artmaking rises to the surface in These Grand Places: Imagining National Belonging in American Landscapes, as she documents human-influenced environmental changes as well as political interventions in the landscape. One of the major themes of this collection of works is the U.S. border and the border wall that became a cornerstone of Trump’s political agenda.
Tomiko Jones, Coyote + Border Wall, Twilight (1/3), 2021, photointaglio. Coyote + Border Wall, Text (2/3), 2021, handwritten text on rag. Coyote + Border Wall, Tracks (3/3), 2021, photointaglio. Image by Maggie Sava.
Jones describes in one of her displayed field notes, Coyote + Border Wall, Text (2/3) (2021), “a strange, incarcerated view through the bars of the border wall” that she experiences during her travels. [7] Coyote + Border Wall, Twilight (1/3) (2021) and Coyote + Border Wall, Tracks (3/3), (2021) show this slatted view that, while not completely solid, serves to obscure and obfuscate views of the land on either side.
Tomiko Jones, Coyote + Border Wall, Tracks (3/3), 2021, photointaglio. Image by Maggie Sava.
Coyote + Border Wall, Tracks (3/3) embodies the narrative shared in the corresponding note, plotted through the sedimentary layout that shows the animal’s tracks at the bottom leading up to the fence, which in this image looks like a fringed edge. In the text, Jones describes seeing a coyote moving near a gap in, at that time, the unfinished segment of the wall and then returning to the same location two years later to find the gap closed, casting uncertainty about the coyote’s fate depending on which side it ended up on, and which side it needs to travel to (but no longer can).
Tomiko Jones, Portrait of a Border Patrol Agent (CBP 1/3), 2021, printed 2024, archival pigment print on Photo Rag Baryta. Image by Maggie Sava.
Jones’ focus on the evidence of a coyote’s presence on the land, shown by the tracks in the photograph, invokes several additional layers of significance. The coyote is a part of many Indigenous stories, including the creation story of the Tohono O’odham tribe of the Sonoran region, whose land the border wall intersects. [8] Coyote is also the colloquial term for someone who smuggles migrants across the U.S. border. The many repercussions of the social and political harm caused by the criminalization of human migration is parallel to concerns over how the border wall affects animal migration and the lasting negative impacts it has on the local wildlife. [9]
Tomiko Jones, At the edge of the Tohono O’odham Nation, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, US and Sonora, México, 2021, platinotype. Image by Maggie Sava.
In At the Edge of the Tohono O'odham Nation, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, U.S. and Sonora, México (2021), Jones plays with scale to show the ostentatiousness of the border wall project by depicting a lone human figure against what appears to be an endless fence. It is unclear if the person captured in the photo is an official or civilian, and what their purpose for being there is. Importantly, Jones’ includes a land attribution in the title to signify that this area is part of the Tohono O’odham nation, exposing the multiple layers of irony and hypocrisy in defining borders of the “American” nation, one built on stolen lands.
Tomiko Jones, Border Chiaroscuro, Coronado National Forest, Arizona, 2021, printed 2024, piezography print on Photo Rag Baryta from scanned 120 negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
By exposing the ways that border delineation—which reflects the demarcation between bodies based on race, ethnicity, and nationality—polices the movement of specific bodies, Jones illuminates how presence in a landscape is validated only for certain populations based on arbitrary criteria that assigns value and a right to belong based on identity. The questions that Jones’ explores in this series, and throughout the show, including immigration, personal identity, race, and environmental and social justice, are especially at the forefront with the changing of administrations this year and the right-wing agenda and rhetoric of the incoming president, whose former administration itself put these public lands at risk. The political nature of this show is not incidental—it is perpetual and pressing.
An installation view of Tomiko Jones’ exhibition The Intimate Infinite at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Image by Maggie Sava.
The need for sustained, active attention to social justice issues pervades Excavate: Artifacts of Being (2023–present), another body of works being shown in full for the first time in this exhibition. Excavate emerged from Jones’s visit to the Manzanar National Historic Site in California and Topaz Camp National Historic Landmark in Utah—the locations of two Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Tomiko Jones, sea & cloud (from Cloud & Smoke, collaborative artists’ book with Karen Zimmerman), 2024, risograph, letterpress, and chine-collé. Image by Maggie Sava.
Jones’ family was impacted by internment, and she recalls a story in which her grandfather buried the belongings connected to their Japanese culture in their land in Hawai’i out of fear. [10] When set alongside the images of These Grand Places, Excavate reveals that we are not as far removed from this history as it seems. It shows how restricting the right to movement and place in the name of “protection” is an ongoing enforcement of power, as has been seen in the U.S.’s many histories of incarceration. [11]
An installation view of Tomiko Jones’ exhibition The Intimate Infinite at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Image by Maggie Sava.
Jones returns to image-making as a way of bearing witness to and commemorating death in Imprints and Other Stories (2017–present). This work is made up of collected cyanotypes of animal remains that Jones encounters during her different journeys. The act of developing these pictures converges the relationship between animal and landscape, as forms of the creatures’ bodies are replicated onto the paper through the sun’s exposure of the cyanotype chemicals. [12]
Tomiko Jones, Hawk Remains (1-3), 2022, unique cyanotypes. Tomiko Jones, Hawk Remains (4), 2022, handwritten text on rag. Image by Maggie Sava.
The result, as Jones’ describes it, “is a negative, an absence.” The white spaces of the cyanotypes are a realization of the limitations of photography. Even with a certain specificity (the evidence of place in the very makeup of the image) and verisimilitude (in this case, a completely proportional outline of form), the core essence and presence of that which is being depicted cannot be fully contained in the image. Representation becomes an act of honoring, not one of recreating.
Tomiko Jones, Barred Owl, 2019, unique cyanotype. Tomiko Jones, Racoon, 2019, unique cyanotype. Image by Maggie Sava.
There is so much to dive into in The Intimate Infinite, and a great amount of weight behind so many of the images. Yet, where its expansiveness could easily become intimidating, the sincerity of Jones’ work instead makes it feel like an open invitation. What guided me along throughout all of the different sections of the exhibition was the way in which Jones ruminates on the different significances of disappearance, the question of what constitutes natural versus forced disappearances, and how the different scales of impact, from the profoundly personal to the environmental and political spheres, tend to fold in on one another.
Tomiko Jones, The Fox (1/2), 2018, unique cyanotype. Tomiko Jones, Text: The Fox (2/2), 2018, handwritten text on rag. Image by Maggie Sava.
In her acts of documentation, Jones poses the questions about what can truly be captured in representation, and how the materiality of a photograph might give (plat)forms to the fleeting and impermanent. What happens when the subject is in the midst of disappearance, and only the representation is left? What happens when presence and our relationship to land become a political debate, and who has the power to legitimize the different ways that manifests? How can witnessing serve preservation—cultural, physical, and environmental—while honoring the inevitably shifting nature of experience?
Tomiko Jones, Butsudan, 2010, printed in 2024, piezography print on Photo Rag Baryta from scanned 4x5 negative. Image by Maggie Sava.
There will be three different opportunities to engage more deeply with the work throughout March, including an open house with Jones on March 13 and a closing reception with Jones on March 21. You can learn more and register to attend these events at msudenver.edu/cva/events. You can also go further into the content by exploring the reading lists assembled by Jones and the Denver Public Library to accompany this exhibition, which are available at msudenver.edu/cva/exhibitions/archive/the-intimate-infinite/.
Maggie Sava (she/her) is an art historian and writer based in Denver. She holds a BA in art history and English, creative writing from the University of Denver and an MA in contemporary art theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.
[1] Tomiko Jones, artist’s statement, Tomiko Jones: The Intimate Infinite, Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Denver, Colorado.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Transcriptions of Jones’ handwritten field notes, including Coyote + Border Wall, Text (2/3), can be read online in both English and Spanish at www.msudenver.edu/cva/exhibitions/archive/the-intimate-infinite/written-text/.
[8] Read more about the Tohono O’odham creation story at “Honoring a Legacy — Creation Story of the Papago/Tohono O’odham,” Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, posted August 10, 2012, fac.coloradocollege.edu/honoring-a-legacy-creation-story-of-the-papago-tohono-oodham/.
[9] Concerns over the impact of the border wall on the local habitats of the Sonoran desert have led to the initiation of a study of mammals in the area, which is currently being conducted by Arizona’s Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program. “Evaluating impacts of the U.S.A.-Mexico border wall on mammal communities of the Sonoran Desert,” USGS, U.S. Department of the Interior, accessed January 14, 2025, www1.usgs.gov/coopunits/project/278440161280/egracia.
[10] Jones, artist’s statement.
[11] The legacy of Japanese internment is a part of Colorado’s history as well. During the Second World War, more than 7,000 people of Japanese descent were detained at the Granada Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado. “Background,” Amache.org, accessed January 14, 2025, amache.org/.
[12] For an explanation of the cyanotype process, see Matt Cummings, “A simple process one can do while social distancing inspired by the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins,” Smith College Museum of Art, published July 16, 2020, scma.smith.edu/blog/simple-process-one-can-do-while-social-distancing-inspired-cyanotypes-anna-atkins.
