Date: Sunday, October 20
Address: City Museum, 701 N 15th, 4th Fl, St. Louis, MO 63103
Media: Fiber, Installation, Sculpture
Studio Features: Child-Friendly, Restroom
Jon Young, The Drifter, 2018, Wood, sand, iridescent fabric, batting Photo Courtesy: Randie Flowers 
Jon Young, Confluence at Night, 2018, Wood, sand, iridescent fabric, batting Photo Courtesy: Randie Flowers 
Jon Young, High Noon Squints, 2018, Wood, sand, iridescent fabric, batting Photo Courtesy: Randie Flowers 
Jon Young, Dowsing Post, 2018, Wood, sand, iridescent fabric, batting Photo Courtesy: Randie Flowers 
Jon Young, California Doubling, 2018, Wood, sand, iridescent fabric, batting Photo Courtesy: Randie Flowers My work is about the development of language and signage. I create wood, sand, and fabric sculptures, that use historical symbols from Paleolithic cave paintings, ancient Greek pottery, and even the line in the sand from Hollywood Westerns and Looney Tune cartoons. Through this use of popular imagery of the US West, I ground the waymarks in the mythologies of the frontier, an ideological concept popularized by the historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, which has signified both European opportunity and indigenous genocide. Reflecting this duel nature of the US West, my work is informed both by my nomadic childhood in a constantly uprooted US military family and by the cultural displacement of my Native American heritage.
The materials in my work recall the irradiation of nuclear testing sites in the West while visually performing like hallucinations one experiences in the desert: visible, yet elusive, like a hologram. My works flicker, shift and move like op-art as the viewer orients themselves to them. In that they are never perceived in exactly the same way by any two individuals in a space at the same time, I create relationships through these waymarks that mimic the idiosyncratic individual relationships to a grand historical narrative.
