Meet Emily Blythe Jones of Monte Vista Projects

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Blythe Jones.

Emily Blythe, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I still really feel like I’m just at the start of things but I suppose I’ve been trying to crack away at this whole being an artist thing for a little while now! I started off taking a heap load of art classes during high school and at a community college back in the north-west suburbs of Chicago, IL. In 2010, my husband and I moved to the San Fernando Valley.

I attended California State University Northridge and earned my MFA with an emphasis in painting and sculpture in 2016. It’s pretty fantastic program and one that I’m really proud to have been a part of. I studied under Samantha Fields and Christian Tedeschi as the respective heads of painting and sculpture departments and was really pretty deeply involved with the painting and sculpture clubs that hosted artist visits and organized exhibitions. It’s also a teaching program so I was able to get my feet wet After graduating, I worked for a year teaching at both Cal State Northridge and a private Jewish high school in the valley.

I’m taking a break from teaching this year – the 2017-2018 year is the first time that I’ve been outside of the academic system in ages! Last August, I was inducted in as new members of Monte Vista Projects, an artist-run collective in the Bendix building in Downtown LA. Working with the group of phenomenal artists has really been inspiring and informative. We’re sister spaces with Tiger Strikes Astroid Los Angeles and next door to PØST which means even more good people to work with. And more galleries are moving in! I’ve had the chance to work on all sorts of great projects alongside the members of MVP and TSALA since I began and I feel like we’ve got so much more to look forward to.

I have a studio that I work out of in our home near Inglewood with a sweet, spacious empty garage that I am using as a project space, and I’ve got a couple exciting future projects up my sleeve as well!

Has it been a smooth road?
There have definitely been struggles, but it’s really incredible how much they amount to lessons learned when taken stock of retrospectively. I’ve had highs and lows within my own personal studio career and with being part of MVP, of course.

Just within the last few months of working with Monte Vista, we’ve faced very interesting setbacks, including the crazy debacle with having an entire show stolen which I’ll summarize at that but you can read more about in my dear friend Carl Baratta’s interview (https://voyagela.com/interview/meet-carl-baratta-tiger-strikes-asteroid-los-angeles-tsala-dtla-fashion-district-bendix-building/). Graduate school is full of fun challenges – you know what they say about putting in your blood, sweat, and tears! But it’s all together incredibly worthwhile and fulfilling.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
For Monte Vista Projects, we’re known for being a part of a growing community of artist-run alternative spaces in Los Angeles, and specifically amongst the community of artists in the Bendix Building. We have historically been a space that represents underserved and emerging Los Angeles based artists. Recently, we’ve been spreading out to an even larger community that encompasses artist-run alternative spaces nationally and internationally. We are just now wrapping up the Los Angeles portion of an ongoing exchange with Åplus from Berlin at our own space and with 15 other Los Angeles and Berlin-based spaces at the Torrance Art Museum.

For my own personal professional artistic meddlings, I’ve become entranced with creating installations of paintings and sculptures based on my family archive of photography, focusing specifically on the themes of family, food, and lack of self-consciousness. Recently, I’ve found a new love in studying and attempting to replicate the time-honored tradition of cheese-carving as a way of exploring said themes. It’s been pretty awesome. I think I want to try out asking some cheese shops if they’d be willing to sponsor me for materials. If you know of any good cheesemongers or cheese-makers that might want to work with an artist that wants to carve/sculpt/maybe even make cheese, hmu.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I feel like Los Angeles is the best city for existing artist-run collectives like ours, but that might be because I’m not aware of what the alternatives are really like. We have so much fantastic energy amassing for artist-run collectives because they meet a need that the city has right now. But actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know whether I’d necessarily recommend it to new spaces starting out from outside of Los Angeles? It’s not the easiest place to afford to rent unless you can band together with a group of peers.

It’s a peculiar sentiment to feel as I want our community to grow and strengthen. It’s hard to imagine not having the continuing influx of incredible artists coming from all over the world to study, work and make here – our community can just continue becoming stronger. For example, I’ve recently been working with a woman that was living here for the last few months from New York who just started an incredible new critique club for female-identifying individuals here in LA lovingly referred to as the “Lady Painters Night” – what would we do without new ideas and energies keeping us on our toes!

With Monte Vista Projects, in particular, were built from the place we exist within, and specifically from the various Los Angeles universities we attended, but I know that’s not the same for every space. My hope is just that we can continue to have enough opportunities for people to live and flourish here. There are a lot of things our city can improve upon that could positively affect not just the lives of artists but a multitude of others who are struggling, but that’s a whole other story that I don’t feel qualified to speak on.

Contact Info:

• Address: 1206 Maple Ave. 5th floor, #523 Los Angeles, CA 90015
• Website: http://www.montevistaprojects.com and http://www.emilybjones.com
• Email: infomvpmail@gmail.com and emilyblythejones@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MonteVistaProjects/ and https://www.instagram.com/emilyblythejones/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/montevistaprojects and https://www.facebook.com/emilyblythejonesart/
  

1. “These Arms of Mine, They Are Yearning” (From the series “Can I Offer You a Nice Egg in This Trying Time?”) 

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