Betterland

Philadelphia-based artist Gregory Eddi Jones’ pictures draw from streams of common advertising images to reflect on photography’s use as a vehicle for idealism, fantasy, and the promise of paradise.

The production of his pictures begins with strategies of appropriation, compositing, digital manipulation. These images then undergo a printing technique that allows for the image, rendered with wet ink, to undergo mark-making, smearing, and bleeding before being dried and re-scanned into virtual space. The process, which Jones considers a means of “un-photographing”, breaks down the architectures of commercial photographic rhetoric and rebuilds them into new potentials of equivocacy.

The liberation of these images from photography’s traditional burdens of truth-telling enters into an exploration between the tensions of certainty and ambiguity, the fragility of shared meaning, and a reflection American's decent into an era of "post-truth" discourse.