Kim Jones emerged from the 1970s performance art movement in Southern California, where he became widely known for his alter ego, Mudman. Caked in mud, bearing a lattice appendage of sticks attached to his back and wearing a headdress and nylon mask, this unsettling, itinerant figure appeared on city streets, beaches, subways, and in galleries. Connecting the abstract, formal investigations of process and material-based artists and the intense physicality of body-based performance, Mudman evolved from Jones’ early stick sculptures tightly bound in what would become his signature materials of nylon, rope, electrical tape, and foam rubber. Jones uses documentation of Mudman, as well as sculptures that result from performances and installations to develop an idiom of forms and hybrid creatures — inspired, in part, by Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse — that appear throughout his drawings.

Two pivotal moments in Jones’ life profoundly inform the content of his work. Born in San Bernardino, California in 1944, at age seven Jones was diagnosed with a polio-like illness that confined him to a wheelchair and then leg braces until he reached the age of ten. Thirteen years later, he served for a year as a Marine in the Vietnam War from 1967 to ’68. Traces of these ordeals reverberate throughout his work, which deals with, among other matters, war, confinement and catharsis.

Jones’ frequent reuse of materials and motifs has resulted in a core imagery that demands an inquiry into cultural representations of violence. As if recalling a trauma or enacting a ritual remembrance, he often and repeatedly reworks his drawings and sculpture, which explains why most of them reference multiple dates spanning decades. Kim Jones: A Retrospective shows a network interconnecting his performance, drawings, and sculpture. Children’s toys such as tricycles and plastic soldiers are combined with sculptures from the 1970s — transforming them into vehicles that race around the gallery walls — life-size rubber rats, old coats swathed in built-up acrylic, and fields of star sculptures made of bundled sticks are presented alongside drawings, photographs, and collage to create what he considers a complete work of art.