Art Show – De’Joneiro Jones
“Tempus Fugit (Time Flies)”
The art of De’Joneiro Jones explodes with energy. A cacophony of color, texture, and shape burst from his work in an exploration of historical and contemporary visual language. Antique banknotes are collaged with cut-up credit and ID cards; acrylic paint splatters with a brash bravado in tension with popcultural imagery, newsprint, and textiles. Traditional multimedia art by definition includes more than one type of art-making process, be it painting or sculpture. Jones’s canvases are comprised of found objects across a wide spectrum of references and materials. The power of Jones’s work stems from this purposeful clash between high and low, old and new, the simplicity of the urban grid and the strategic chaos of paint drips, streaks, and thick amorphous blobs. Hip-hop moguls meet plastic school bus rings scattered across the canvas— a stop sign, a sheriff’s badge, and a delicate cameo brooch expand what we typically think of as painting. But what does it all mean? What seems vivid abstraction from a distance emerges as a logic of form and content the closer one examines; images of Anita Hill and the LA riots make meaningful dialogue with Louis Vuitton monograms, a Jimi Hendrix postage stamp, and a postcard advertising a high fashion retail store. For Jones, legacy becomes luxury, and vice versa. And amidst the iconography of the national, the global, the large and the minute, the infrastructure of St. Louis—be it commercial, institutional, or underground—is thrown into powerful relief. In Jones’s artwork, street cred grounds a new understanding of past and present, private and public, right and wrong. Racial and socioeconomic tensions make way for a space of introspection from which we cannot land on any definitive solution. What defines us as consumers, and as citizens? Need they be the same thing? Jones’s artwork confronts us with these questions, and compels us to reassess our identities as both individuals and members of a tumultuous human whole.
See more of his work at https://www.mccaughenandburr.com/artists/jones-dejoneiro-dj/
This show will run from April 1 through May 15, with a reception on Sunday, April 3, 11:15.