THE ARMORY SHOW 2025: JO DENNIS
JO-HS Gallery is honored to present Jo Dennis at The Armory Show 2025.
SELECTED ARTWORKS
Jo Dennis (b. 1973, UK) is a British artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, weaving a visual language deeply rooted in materiality and memory. Her work contemplates the fragile relationship between place and time, engaging with ruination, surface, and decay as poetic signifiers of transformation and mortality.
For The Armory Show 2025, JO-HS presents a series of small-format works developed during Dennis’s residency at Studio Lazcano in Mexico City. The city’s eclectic architecture and layered social fabric became a catalyst for this body of work. Inspired by Horizontal Vertigo - A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro, Dennis approached Mexico City not as a static backdrop, but as a dynamic, living entity—one where makeshift repairs and ad-hoc constructions serve as visible records of time, improvisation, and human presence.
Throughout the residency, Dennis integrated objects from previous works into the studio and into the new pieces—an act of grounding herself in an unfamiliar space and imbuing it with a sense of belonging. Embracing this impulse, Dennis' paintings born from this period reflect a disjointed, non-linear experience of the city, echoing the way our memories are often assembled—from fragments, sensations, and overlooked details.
This intimate attention to material and memory extends to the sculptures The Maiden and Bobby (2025), which merge painting and sculpture into hybrid forms. Constructed with steel frames and found materials—including tent canvas, yarn, and pieces of the artist’s own clothing—these works evoke the rich folds of religious drapery, collapsing image and structure into one. Both sculptures serve as metaphors for human existence, meditating on the delicate balance between physical and emotional support systems.
Bunting, which appears in both sculptures and paintings, is traditionally associated with celebration. It introduces a sense of joy and nostalgia—yet in Dennis’s hands, its faded and worn quality evokes the fragility of time, like a relic from another era. This emotional layering continues with the incorporation of small children’s watches found in Mexico City, quietly embedded in some of the paintings. Together, these elements summon a distant, almost dreamlike sense of childhood—where memory is both tender and elusive.
In these works, Dennis reclaims fragments of place, fusing memory and material to construct forms that are at once grounded and ephemeral, architectural and profoundly human.
For The Armory Show 2025, JO-HS presents a series of small-format works developed during Dennis’s residency at Studio Lazcano in Mexico City. The city’s eclectic architecture and layered social fabric became a catalyst for this body of work. Inspired by Horizontal Vertigo - A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro, Dennis approached Mexico City not as a static backdrop, but as a dynamic, living entity—one where makeshift repairs and ad-hoc constructions serve as visible records of time, improvisation, and human presence.
Throughout the residency, Dennis integrated objects from previous works into the studio and into the new pieces—an act of grounding herself in an unfamiliar space and imbuing it with a sense of belonging. Embracing this impulse, Dennis' paintings born from this period reflect a disjointed, non-linear experience of the city, echoing the way our memories are often assembled—from fragments, sensations, and overlooked details.
This intimate attention to material and memory extends to the sculptures The Maiden and Bobby (2025), which merge painting and sculpture into hybrid forms. Constructed with steel frames and found materials—including tent canvas, yarn, and pieces of the artist’s own clothing—these works evoke the rich folds of religious drapery, collapsing image and structure into one. Both sculptures serve as metaphors for human existence, meditating on the delicate balance between physical and emotional support systems.
Bunting, which appears in both sculptures and paintings, is traditionally associated with celebration. It introduces a sense of joy and nostalgia—yet in Dennis’s hands, its faded and worn quality evokes the fragility of time, like a relic from another era. This emotional layering continues with the incorporation of small children’s watches found in Mexico City, quietly embedded in some of the paintings. Together, these elements summon a distant, almost dreamlike sense of childhood—where memory is both tender and elusive.
In these works, Dennis reclaims fragments of place, fusing memory and material to construct forms that are at once grounded and ephemeral, architectural and profoundly human.
INSTALLATION VIEWS
