Jon Young

BIOGRAPHY

Jon Young (b. 1981, Winston-Salem, NC) is a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Young explores the development of language and signage in the American West. Young’s wood, sand, and fabric sculptures, which he refers to as “waymarks,” adopt historical symbols from Paleolithic cave paintings, ancient Greek pottery, and imagery of Hollywood Westerns and Looney Tunes cartoons. Young depicts 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. His recent solo exhibitions include Carl Kostyál at Intersect Art Fair, Aspen; J Hammond Projects, London; LCCC, Cheyenne, WY; and No Place Gallery Columbus OH. Young holds a BFA from the University of Wyoming. He was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at Washington University in Saint Louis, 2018–19, and was awarded a Lighton International Artist Exchange Program Grant in 2020.

Jon Young constructs bright and iridescent wall works and sculptures to explore the enduring mythology of the American West. These works, which he refers to as “waymarks,” utilize symbols commonly found on road signs to consider the interconnection between nostalgia for an imagined American past and Indigenous erasure. Drawing upon his Indigenous heritage, nomadic upbringing, and time spent in California’s Mojave Desert, Young’s “waymarks” serve as a rhetorical map to return “to a home that no longer exists.” They operate as signposts intended to convey direction and misdirection, destination and meandering, challenging the viewer to question both where they come from and where they are going.


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