Fabien Castanier Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition for contemporary Miami-based artist, Jon Davis. The exhibition, Brokedown Palace, is on view September 18 through October 16 beginning with an all-day opening reception. This is the first solo exhibition for Jon Davis at the gallery, featuring a curated collection of mixed media works.

The artist presents his most recent body of work as an homage to the city he calls home. Throughout Brokedown Palace, images capturing “moments” of Miami are fractured, stratified, and presented through a renewed understanding of not only the space they represent, but as they currently exist within each seamless rendering. After undergoing a year-long distillation period, this most recent body of work expresses the culmination of Davis’s practice over the past 30 years.

In previous iterations of his work, Davis used found photographs to curate narratives that express the nuanced, often untranslatable, realities that exist within the human experience. In this new tangential vein, Brokedown Palace brings his concept closer to home. The artist features his own photographs taken throughout the tropical metropolis placed in conversation with imagery pertinent to the larger story of Art History, and translated through Davis’s conceptually based process. 

Brokedown Palace is comprised of synthesized realities, dissolving the gap between past and present. Davis merges each selected image to question a conventional understanding of reality while simultaneously highlighting their similarities. He flattens the chronological distance between each facet within each collage as they are flush, mounted on canvas or wood. Davis’s work shows that regardless of the technological changes that develop with the passing of time, the symbiotic relationship between art and life never ceases.

Through the duration of his artistic career, Davis’s self-taught practice has created his distinctly unique visual language, pulling inspiration from the philosophical, and ensuing formal, evolution of the arts in the late twentieth century. Davis’s work can be understood as a personal rendition of ready-mades, as he transforms present happenings provided by his surroundings through each synthesized reality contained within panes of glass. In this, Davis uses skills of everyday life to reflect a higher creative culture.