Jake Thornton — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Jake Thornton

(Photo/Media MFA 25)
https://www.jakethornton.com/

Full Circle; Isaiah 4:6; Out of the Frying Pan; Into the Fire; Gospel, Chromogenic Prints, 2024

Jake Thornton’s photographs, taken across America during a two-month road trip, engage with the history of American photography by appropriating and subverting tropes of ‘American visual language.’ Rooted in themes of isolation, grief, and irony, his images invite us to look closer at what we have culturally accepted as American mythology. What does American mythology stand for today? How does this mythology’s visual language take form in both obvious and subtle ways throughout daily life? Aesthetically informed by classic American road films and the history of American painting, these darkroom prints employ uniform hues and color palettes, creating an eerie sense of comfort. (Over each location, Thornton describes ‘the dark cloud of the American Dream looming over’.) The formality of presentation invites viewers to look, while the symbols within the images ask viewers, as the artist notes, to see. Through editing and sequencing, Thornton re-appropriates and subverts nationalist visual tropes to create a wider view of context. We see the marks of land development, traces of social change; we note how large corporations have sold easy solutions to disenfranchise the working class, decimating communities in small towns and rural areas. Today there is almost no economy left to keep big box stores in business and further, nothing is coming to replace them. The ‘only cons tants are churches and bars’. These images act as reminders to think about things we overlook, like signs on the side of the road.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025