jon davis
Miami-based collage artist, Jon Davis, presents his most recent body of work as an homage to the city he calls home. Throughout “Brokedown Palace” images capturing ‘moments’ of Miami are fractured, stratified, and presented through a renewed understanding of not only the space they represent, but as they currently exist within each seamless rendering. After undergoing a year-long distillation period, this most recent body of work can be expressed as the culmination of Davis’s practice over the past 30 years.
In previous iterations of his work, Davis has used found photographs to curate narratives that express the nuanced, often untranslatable, realities that exist within the human experience. In this tangential vein of new work, “Brokedown Palace” brings this concept closer to come featuring photographs taken by the artist throughout the tropical metropolis, placed in conversation with imagery pertinent to the larger story of Art History, and translated through Davis’s conceptually based process.
Davis’s work is comprised of synthesized realities, dissolving the gap between past and present. He merges each selected image to question a conventional understanding of reality while simultaneously highlighting their similarities. He flattens the chronological distance between each facet within each collage as they are flush, mounted on canvas or wood. Davis’s work shows that regardless of the technological changes that develop with the passing of time, the symbiotic relationship between art and life never ceases.
Through the duration of his artistic career, Davis’s self-taught practice creates his distinctly unique visual language, pulling inspiration from the philosophical, and ensuing formal, evolution of the arts in the late twentieth century. Davis’s work can be understood as a personal rendition of ready-mades, as he transforms present happenings provided by his surroundings through each synthesized reality contained within panes of glass. In this, Davis uses skills of everyday life to reflect a higher creative culture.