Field Guild: an introduction by Kurt Mueller        How can one classify the creations of Jules Buck Jones? In large-scale drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations—all depicting animal subjects—Jones upends scientific categories and artistic structures, wreaking havoc on taxonomic and pictorial order. Throughout his work, Jones mines the animal kingdom for its narrative possibility and psychological resonance, as well as for its potential as image and aesthetic experience. Portraying biodiversity as open-ended and evolving, he employs a matching range of represent- ational, compositional, and mark-making strategies.        Vulturesquid (2009), for example, collides its eponymous buzzard and squid with an ocelot, creating a diving beak with streaming tentacles emitting an explosion of spots. The distinction between abstraction and figuration blurs: eyeball and suction-cup forms make a single pattern, and cross-hatching reads as feathers and fur; the entire collage resolves as a fantastic, frenetic monster. Jones frequently decontextualizes his animals (or animal parts) in this way, portraying them separate from habitat or natural landscape. Instead he incorporates each into the picture plane, as part of the compositional space of the paper.        Likewise, as pictures of animals, Jones’s works do not conform to the expectations of scientific natural- ism. He works from pre-existing images: typically the photography and illustrations of guidebooks and issues of National Geographic. The documentary pretensions of his source material, however, are superseded by Jones’s improvising hand and the properties of his chosen media—acrylic, graphite, ink, watercolor, and an assortment of drawing tools. The relationship between the resulting image and its viewer proves similarly mutable. Denying an observational remove, Jones invites his viewer to participate—optically and bodily, conceptually and imaginatively—in the construction of each picture’s meaning.        Raptors (2009), for instance, presents twenty-four portraits, each detailing an avian specimen with abstract, gestural marks. This collection is part of a larger installation in which Jones attempts to picture every genera of the diurnal birds of prey. Arranged in a haphazard grid, the portraits clash illustration with formal experimentation; the ambitions of visual order and scientific reason collide with a spectrum of difference. Raptors is a catalogue of variation, a biological and aesthetic morphology, but it can also can be construed as family or team portraiture. Similarly, Sibley’s Vortex (2007) reproduces entries from The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (2003) as a single flock. The unlikely, unnatural mass is depicted in flight, circling like vultures. The viewer, looking at this target, becomes its implied center.        Large-scale drawings like Black Tip #1 and #4 (both 2007) and Porosus (2007) similarly address the viewer’s physical presence in front of the work by theatrically confronting her with images of violence, both enacted and suggested. In Porosus, Jones draws the head of Crocodylus porosus, the saltwater crocodile, super-sized and descending threateningly from the top of the frame. The crocodile’s open mouth would appear to engulf a close-looking viewer (or a viewer’s hand, as reproduced here). This storyline, however, is only one way to read the image. The crocodile, decapitated by the frame—or hung from its tail, outside the frame—is rendered equally vulnerable. Porosus also exemplifies Jones’s predilection for predators: reptiles and birds in particular. This interest in carnivores may find its origin in a boyhood infatuation, but Jones’s works also empathetically consider the complex and precarious position of topping the food chain, a position we share. As our peers, beastly predators challenge the human desire to control nature.        Jones’s drawings skirt issues of genetic manipulation, biological evolution, and extinction. The hybrid forms of Vulturesquid, as well as Warthogramhawk #4 (2009), suggest a Doctor-Moreau-like laboratory of mutation and modification. Jones’s drawings, however, do not offer didactic commentary on natural selection or more artificial tinkering. Rather, his works provoke viewers to react to the results—the alien, unfamiliar, or irrational—asking whether imagination becomes a liberating or constraining force. For Jones, it is the former: Warthogramhawk #4 revisits a sketch Jones dreamt up as a child twenty years ago, and Plan B (2006) offers a recent vision thro­ugh which prehistoric animals re-populate Earth in unexpected ways. Ultimately, it is the viewer’s imagination that animates Jones’s drawings. In their visual abstraction and narrative ambiguity, his works remind us that “monsters” and “marvels” are always, in part, our own creation.