Jon Lewis

"This painting is from a series of works referencing modern, formalist abstraction while simultaneously questioning its authority as a dominant patriarchal method of art-making. Instead, this formalist language is reimagined through the self-constructed queer aesthetics of night clubs from the 1970s to the 1990s. Found footage, photographs, and first-hand accounts become a rich archive to reference, pull apart, and pieced back together, allowing for a historical recounting that is full of subjectivity and contradiction. Through this personal revisionist history, queer futurity is framed by abstraction, disco is considered utopia, and the dancefloor as serious and important as a modernist grid painting."

Push/Push, oil on canvas, 16x14, 2020

Jon Lewis

Pink At Night (2020)Oil, acrylic, and spray paint on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

My work is influenced predominantly by feminist and queer theory, art history, and a personal dedication to abstraction. Using theory as a lens to critique the modernist canon and challenge hetero-masculine conventions, I investigate where the work I make exists within these histories. There is an element of camp that is always considered, a high/low relationship between the convention I am referencing and the queerness of my distortion to it. In this painting, I am taking the grid, a formal modernist totem, and asserting it into a queerspace. Blurring its edges, knocking it off-kilter, and pushing it further back into the painting’s physical space, having it function no longer as a concrete structure but rather a variable actor within the image. This sense of destabilization is reinforced in how I contend with the picture plane, building out the canvas and inserting contradictory spacial relations and shifts in depth. Living in this historic moment of such disorder and uncertainty, rethinking, challenging, and queering the conventions of abstraction seems more important to me now than ever before.