One Eye Closed
September 23 – November 4, 2023
Rusha & Co. is proud to present Jon Young: One Eye Closed, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and his first presentation with the gallery. A tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation of Rock Hill, South Carolina, Young’s iridescent wall works and sculptures challenge American symbology and visibility.
In western culture, vision has been considered the noblest of the senses. In renaissance times, the senses were put into a hierarchy with vision at the top and touch at the bottom. Approaching works of art requires a certain level of ocularcentrism, the act of prioritizing visual stimuli to all other stimuli available to human awareness. But what of blind spots in our midst? “How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?” And what shall we do if the same things look different from every angle in which we approach them? The body of work Young’s produced for One Eye Closed is, after all, ever-shifting, the colors gliding across stretched fabric as perspectives change. Young’s symbols fluctuate, literally through rainbows of color, and conceptually through cartographies of meaning.
Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow, conveyed messages from Mount Olympus to earth, and from gods to mortals or other gods, using the rainbow as her stairway. The campfire was similarly a type of message-machine, where clouds of smoke (typically associated with processes of obfuscation) functioned to broadcast critical information. The semiotic assemblages of our time manifest constantly on the roads on which we travel, preaching to us from billboards, advertisements, and in the information highways of the internet. How we move through space becomes contextualized by the signs put up around us by capital, laden with symbols. And yet the transmission of information is always in flux, something lost or changed in each retelling of a message or narrative. Even while our horoscopes, these immutable tropes tied to our spiritual ancestors, have remained with some conceptual consistency, the skies above us have slid past the meanings from which those truisms were divined.
Jon Young draws a line in the sand for his onlookers. For a chicken, this is an act of magnetic hypnotism, induced by the marcation in their gaze into a state of trance. David Crockett’s line in the sand was a choice made visible in the American mythos. Young’s corrugations, instead of the ephemeral gestures blown away by the wind, become permanent in his sculptures and wall-works, questioning notions of free will, choice, and fate itself. He creates a pressure within his stretched fabrics, his materials embodying a literal and figurative tension between self determination and destiny manifest.
Jon Young was born in Winston Salem, North Carolina (1981) and now lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a BFA from the University of Wyoming and an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. Recent exhibitions include Tin Star Tall Tales (with Canyon Castador), Volery Gallery, Dubai (2023, two-person); The Other Side of Quicksand, Great Rivers Biennial, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2022, solo); Looking West (with Anselm Reyle), Morgan Presents, New York (2022, two-person); Manscaping, The Hole, Los Angeles (2022); Beautiful Freaks, Tuesday to Friday, Valencia (2022); Strangers in the House, Semiose Gallery, Paris (2021); Stockholm Sessions, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021); and Nature Morte, The Hole, New York (2021).
Jon Young
One Eye Closed, 2023
iridescent fabric, batting, and wood
72¼ x 48 x 3 in.
183.5 x 122 x 7.6 cm
Artworks
Installation Views
Selected Press
