Gregory Eddi Jones: Flowers for Donald and Countries Glorious
Kaitlyn Jo Smith: Campaign
October 12 - December 7, 2019
CO-OPt Research + Projects presents two concurrent solo exhibitions by Gregory Eddi Jones and Kaitlyn Jo Smith, curated by Aaron Hegert. In the front gallery, Jones’ series Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious (2016-18), for which the artist won the 2018-19 FOAM Talent award, reflects on the overabundance of competing information and opinions via 24-hour news networks, social media, and memes, collaged into digital floral arrangements. Smith’s video, Campaign (2018), on view in the middle gallery, explores the empty rhetoric of political promises and commercial campaigns, using words and phrases from actual speeches from both major political parties, highlighting the vagueness of political messaging. Both exhibitions address the current political climate where “fake news” and “truthiness” hold sway over broad swaths of the populace. The works reflect on the ultimate meaninglessness of populist political discourse in the digital era, in which access to more information does not necessarily make us smarter.
Gregory Eddi Jones: Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious
Flowers for donald is a series of digital collage work begun in the days following the 2016 U.S. election. The work borrows the symbolic potency of flowers to act as anchor points of protest, memorial, and reflexive connotations of enduring beauty within the traditions of art history. The series is designed to challenge the role and function of art itself in politically turbulent times and borrows from early century European Dadaist strategies of appropriation, collage, and aesthetics of absurdity to reflect instability in political and media environments.
Jones was named a 2018/19 FOAM Talent for the series Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious. The accompanying exhibition was shown in Amsterdam, New York, London, and Frankfurt in 2019. The series was self-published as a limited edition artists' book, Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious, in December, 2018. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the artist:
Gregory Eddi Jones (b. 1986, Syracuse, NY) is an American artist, writer, and publisher who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology (2010) and an MFA from Visual Studies Workshop (2016). His photographic work interrogates politics of common cultural images, and much of his practice is defined by appropriation and re-authorship as a vehicle for visual criticism. He has exhibited work internationally and throughout the United States.Jones is the Founding Editor and Publisher of In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography, an independent platform for noteworthy 21st-century photographic authorship.
Gregory Eddi Jones: Flowers for Donald and Countries Glorious
Kaitlyn Jo Smith: Campaign
October 12 - December 7, 2019
CO-OPt Research + Projects presents two concurrent solo exhibitions by Gregory Eddi Jones and Kaitlyn Jo Smith, curated by Aaron Hegert. In the front gallery, Jones’ series Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious (2016-18), for which the artist won the 2018-19 FOAM Talent award, reflects on the overabundance of competing information and opinions via 24-hour news networks, social media, and memes, collaged into digital floral arrangements. Smith’s video, Campaign (2018), on view in the middle gallery, explores the empty rhetoric of political promises and commercial campaigns, using words and phrases from actual speeches from both major political parties, highlighting the vagueness of political messaging. Both exhibitions address the current political climate where “fake news” and “truthiness” hold sway over broad swaths of the populace. The works reflect on the ultimate meaninglessness of populist political discourse in the digital era, in which access to more information does not necessarily make us smarter.
Gregory Eddi Jones: Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious
Flowers for donald is a series of digital collage work begun in the days following the 2016 U.S. election. The work borrows the symbolic potency of flowers to act as anchor points of protest, memorial, and reflexive connotations of enduring beauty within the traditions of art history. The series is designed to challenge the role and function of art itself in politically turbulent times and borrows from early century European Dadaist strategies of appropriation, collage, and aesthetics of absurdity to reflect instability in political and media environments.
Jones was named a 2018/19 FOAM Talent for the series Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious. The accompanying exhibition was shown in Amsterdam, New York, London, and Frankfurt in 2019. The series was self-published as a limited edition artists' book, Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious, in December, 2018. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the artist:
Gregory Eddi Jones (b. 1986, Syracuse, NY) is an American artist, writer, and publisher who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology (2010) and an MFA from Visual Studies Workshop (2016). His photographic work interrogates politics of common cultural images, and much of his practice is defined by appropriation and re-authorship as a vehicle for visual criticism. He has exhibited work internationally and throughout the United States.Jones is the Founding Editor and Publisher of In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography, an independent platform for noteworthy 21st-century photographic authorship.