SCAD grad’s solo show collides Nascar, Evel Knievel with European history painting
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“Ice Gold,” (2020), acrylic on panel by Evan Jones is one of the paintings by the Atlanta artist featured at Buckhead’s Thomas Deans Fine Art.
Courtesy of Thomas Deans Fine Art
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Did you cat nap in seventh-grade American history? Then maybe you missed learning about the famous battle documented in Jones’ uproarious painting “American History T-REX.” Like the Trapper Keeper doodle of a bored preadolescent boy, the painting depicts a snarling T-Rex and soldiers in Napoleonic uniforms in a fierce and bloody battle. The flatness, which Jones renders the action along with the ludicrous derring-do of the toy-like soldiers who fly through the air like Superman, is a nod to how painting cements imagination into ideology. And yet Jones’ crazy fantasies like a Prussian soldier in “See 7 States” cajoling visitors to “See Rock City” is not too far off from our crazy hodgepodge reality where images of Native Americans have been employed to sell cigarettes and Black women to hawk pancake syrup.
“I Don’t Need Your Rocking Chair,” (2020), acrylic on canvas by Evan Jones.
Courtesy of Thomas Deans Fine Art
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Bricolage is the name of the game for Jones, from the Afghan prayer rug sporting assault weapons and grenades that pops up in one painting, to the luchador and George Washington set against a wallpaper of fighter planes in another. It’s comic gold but also commentary on willful ignorance and an American present that enjoys creating its own alternative facts, fantastic yarns and half-baked conspiracy theories.
“El Ranchero, Sunrise,” (2019), acrylic on canvas by Evan Jones.
Courtesy of Thomas Deans Fine Art
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
There’s a self-aware sentimentality in many of Jones’ paintings that points to a strain of masculine pathos seen in country music, performative patriotism and the outsize mourning of fallen sports and music heroes. There is not a woman to be found in his work. Instead, a rose occasionally pops up in his proscenium paintings, a kind of shorthand for commemoration and love for the soldiers and Nascar drivers and fighting spirit Jones depicts. In “Broken Heart America” a portrait of a sad-eyed cowpoke with a dangly earring is accompanied by a grid below featuring Dale Earnhardt’s number 3, a bleeding broken Valentine heart and an upside-down American flag. It’s a tragedy quilt of manly heartbreak.
I haven’t had this much fun in an art gallery in ages.
EXHIBIT
“Evan Jones: Country Store”
Through March 6. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Masks and social distancing required. Free. 690 Miami Circle NE #905, Atlanta. 404-814-1811, thomasdeansfineart.com.
