Flowers for Donald feels like made-in-the-moment reactions to a politically messy environment and sensational news coverage. The series of digital collages utilize symbol and allegory that we are utterly familiar with, particularly in our digital lives that are constantly bombarded with images, the latest headline, and news updates. Each of these works have an element of humor to them, as well as an immediacy and intuitiveness that defies the definition of “still life”. The whole of the imagery can feel banal, but when one looks closer what may appear average is more than the sum of its parts; the compositions are subject to the erratic nature of politics and manipulation by the powers of the media.

Perhaps Flowers for Donald beckons us to look a little closer. What is the role of art when the world around us is absolutely turbulent? What is reflected back at us when we make art under conditions of unignorable political circumstances? Flowers for Donald utilizes a classic art motif to start to unpack these questions.

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*Flowers for Donald is best viewed full screen.

 

Image list:

Digital image 1—Flowers for donald #11 (with wall and buffalo jump)
Digital image 2—Flowers for donald #13 (artificial flowers [with power tie])
Digital image 3—Flowers for donald #16 (press room [with sponsored content])
Digital image 4—Flowers for donald #18 (a nice day [with some fruit])
Digital image 5—Flowers for donald #19 (how to saddle your pony [with earnest gestures])
Digital image 6—Flowers for donald #20 (channel surfing [with a flock of birds and some good dogs])
Digital image 7—Flowers for donald #21 (talent show [in 3-d])
Digital image 8—Flowers for donald #22 (atrophies [with art motifs])
Digital image 9—Flowers for donald #23 (with white supremacism)

 

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Gregory Eddi Jones (b. 1986) 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).

Jones’ practice examines and re-authors existing image products through the mechanisms of digital- and internet-based tools, and focuses concerns on analyzing the politics of photographs and other images common to the American cultural lexicon. His work has led him to explore a wide range of subject matter, including sports, news pictures, advertising, crime photography, history, war, surveillance, “selfies,” terrorism, landscape, and flowers.

His first book, Another Twenty-Six Gas Stations, was self-published in October, 2014 and has gone on to be acquired by over two dozen institutional artists’ book and photobook collections, including libraries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, RISD, MassArt, MICA and Columbia University. The title was also included in two iterations of the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Books & Co, at Gagosian Gallery Paris and Beverly Hills, respectively,