Jon Young

Courtesy of Carl Kostyál and the artist

The artwork of Jon Young (b.1981, US) is about the development of language and signage. Young’s wood, sand, and fabric sculptures, which he calls “waymarks,” use historical symbols taken from Paleolithic cave paintings, Greek pottery, and even the line in the sand from Hollywood Westerns and Looney Tunes cartoons. Through his use of the popular imagery of the US West, Young grounds his waymarks in the histories and mythologies of the frontier, an ideological concept popularized by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, which has signified both European opportunity and indigenous genocide. Reflecting this dual nature of the US West, Young’s work is informed both by his nomadic childhood in a constantly uprooted US military family and by the cultural displacement of his Native American heritage.

Like Jacques Derrida’s critique that semiotic signs simply defer meaning, that signs can only point to other signs, Young’s work at first seems to offer easily understood archetypal imagery, but, on second glance, these icons shed all commitment to an inherent shared message. Instead of semiotically, we must instead experience these waymarks phenomenologically, adjusting ourselves to them, rather than having them point out to us a way to a transcendent meaning. Young repeats his disorientating waymarks to prompt the viewer to reconsider their own place within the mirage of history’s received meanings.

Jon Young was born in Winston Salem, NC (1981). A tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Young now lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his BFA from the University of Wyoming and his MFA at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is currently working as a Director’s Fellow.

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