Today is the first official day of SPRING / BREAK Art Show! We'll be featuring the individual artists in our curatorial project STANDARD STANDARD throughout the exhibition. Be sure to check us out at 4 Times Square, Floor 23 in Room #24. We'll be here March 1-6, from 11am-6pm daily.

First up is Jon(athan) Key. Jon is a Black Artist, Designer, and Writer. Raised in rural Alabama, Jon started visual art and design at an early age. At 10, Jon taught himself HTML and Java Script. Design became a major tool for his artistic expression. It wasn’t until high school that he began to focus on developing a strong traditional art practice. After summers spent at SCAD and RISD in pre-college programs, Jon matriculated to RISD for his formative art years.

Jon’s work explores the tension and fragmentation of identity. Through collage, installation and painting he creates intimate spaces that recount the experiences of confronting his own queerness, blackness, southerness, and family. He has two pieces from his Man in Violet Suit Series showing at Codify Art’s booth in SPRING/BREAK Art Show. He sold his first painting, Man in the Violet Suit No 3 (Red), during yesterday's press preview! The Man in the Violet Suit series plays on the assumption of self-portraiture. The collaged elements are painted, claiming the verisimilitude of photography in role but embodying the ambiguity of pictorialization in form; the Man, who may or may not be the artist, explores how distance from perception cannot fully negate the gradation between the viewer and the self.

Building upon queerness and blackness as themes in his work, Jon’s installation Cotton and Magnolia focuses on family and southerness. This series forces the viewer to reflect on the past and present burdens of the Black Family in the South. Harkening on bourgeois home aesthetics, the Cotton and Magnolia wallpaper signifies the historical and transgenerational trauma built within the foundation and walls of our society. With a statue cast from his own hands and a collage film based on images created for his zine WE, Jon builds strong narratives that immerse the viewer in a breadth of perspectives and ideas.

We are so proud to have Jon's work as a part of our show STANDARD STANDARD. Check it out, before it’s too late!