Making America, Levi De Jong - Exhibition Review, 2025
Material that matters, surface as a representation of all.
When approaching the idea of Making America, Levi does it through the use of America’s
and maybe even the world’s most known identifier, the American flag. Draped with power,
sacred to some, ominous for others, Levi throws away the bold patriotic colours and takes up
the material known more commonly for roofing of barns and homes in his native Northwest
Iowa.
I want to take you back to the process. I’m privileged in writing this, having not just seen the
work in this grand space, an entrance with a buzzer, a Michelin star restaurant props it up,
where the work hangs before dainty details–cornices that have surrendered their form to
layers of white paint and a window that could be more likely found on the millennium falcon,
A Galaxy far far away from the material that matters and the surfaces that represent an idea
of home.
To an art school, on the bank of the Thames. Levi and I studied Sculpture at the Royal
College and that’s where his work caught my eye. As for my own position and practice in this
text, I’ll keep it brief. Levi and I gravitated towards each other perhaps because we didn’t fit
so cleanly into an idea of sculpture. Our references and language lend itself more to
painting’s historical context: a stretcher, a surface, an image to push and pull the viewer and
the artist alike. With Levi there was a strong connection to the material that he wishes to use
to ‘paint’ and he does not adhere to the norms of art making but instead makes through
looking, attempting, and therefore representing the materials and visual languages of his
environments.
The first work I saw him working on was not dissimilar to the works in this show, however
they didn’t represent or even allude to a flag, or anything at all. We got into that
conversation. With all crits, it starts with visual analysis, where did these grey monochrome
material ‘paintings’ take me, nothing or everything? Micro and macro, zoomed in or zoomed
completely out, damn all or totality. A grey landscape scored where previously the surface
had been nailed to the floor or wall of a commercial unit, that rubber marbling that’s found on
tube floors or hospital wings, stained by the glue that had been gesturally, most likely just
clumsily slapped on, to keep it from springing out of a desired placement. A surface we walk
on every day, the dull greys that line our pavements (sidewalks), roads, the reflected clouds
on the glass skyscrapers that try their hardest to escape beyond the clouds. Let’s use that
height to get an advantage for looking. The view especially in urban areas would still be that
grey homogenous landscape. Even further than that, the tops of clouds, then dark space
with twinkles of stars and then we don’t see with a light spectrum but through radiation,
cosmic background radiation. I frantically pulled out my phone when I arrived at this thought
and brought this image of the CBR to Levi. As an atheist, I see that as everything, known
and unknown, the entire universe, in the way it’s displayed or even translated for humans to
perceive it–it’s a landscape.
I think this zoom in and zoom out still completely exists in the flag works, with different
vantage points. Look at the flag, it’s a flag or a representation of a flag, zoom in, it’s the
material, it’s the material that covers roofs in the Midwest, and aerial view, zoom out it’s the
green brown of the rust belt. The flag in America reaches to god, maybe for Levi too, the
lamb, with its reflective surface becomes God or a representation of god in this exhibition. All
knowing, on its plinth it stands above the visitor and all seeing, in its reflection you see it’s–
even from behind.
Making America, its materials zoom in and zoom out while asking us what we can see of our
country, not what our country can see of us. The surfaces we stand upon and now look at
are all material–a surface as a representation of all.
Accompanying Text For Square Removed, 2024
“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”
Douglas Huebler (1968)
The RCA plywood walls hung on timber frames that reached above the walls. There were no myths to construct how the panels came together to make a wall. The floor between, a place to stand, to sit and so think and to make. This world was not full of objects, bare, requesting a mark, a scoring, collecting, and then materialisation to construct meaning to its recently built frame. Evidence of last year’s making remained–as ruins do–in fragments, to be pieced together, to construct narratives of the past. Bricolage, assemblage, a chain reaction occurred, attempts to make sculpture. A progression of time, objects accumulate. This world was now full of objects.
I, Angelus Novus.
“A Klee drawing named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
A commute from East London to Battersea: walk, tube, tube, bus and walk.
Walk, along a row of high street shops. One of these shops had retired from the setting. Empty floors and walls without activity. The only sign was a square removed from the wall. An action becoming an image. Walking into the studio that day I drew out the proposition of a square to be removed from the plywood walls. I labelled it ‘remove’. After being told I wasn’t allowed to remove the square from that panel, I removed the panel and replaced it with another. I re-enacted the action I assumed of the image I saw in that empty shop. Draw a square, cut the line and remove the square from the panel.
Tube, underground–either central line reds or Victoria line blues–made up the unvaried pallet. Occasional signs of work punctuated this monochrome landscapes. Panels had been removed from the ceiling, ‘redundant cabling’ exposed and labelled using a black felt pen on duct tape. The walls of ads that are put one on top of the other, build surfaces, paintings. Posters, selling life insurance, festival tickets, dog food, various crypto currencies, online banking services, the balloon museum, I could go on… In one of the advertising boards was an A4 piece of paper barely managing to occupy the large surface that was there to promote what I previously listed. On the paper was printed: ‘Poster On Order’– a proposition, a place holder, a redundant poster itself. The language performed to give narrative to a form, a frame, a work. The texts I saw on the underground gave instructions for actions and images to come. Texts as propositions, drawings as alluding to interventions.
A square removed from a wall.
The re-enaction had become reproduction of an image. A painting, a sculpture, a frame. Or the lack of those made material.
The square performed: painting – a painting without ‘used paint’ there was an image, collated forms, pencil markings from the construction of these walls.
The square performed: frame – suggested a place to look through, a suggestion of where to place your feet.
The square performed: sculpture – between the removed and the panel behind became a lack of material, something to walk around.
Exposed the support beam behind and the wood grain of the panel on the other side of the wall.
A natural history.
The light that reflects carries on forever.
The moments of these actions to images are finite periods of time that gather to become history. The light reflected carries these moments to an infinite. A hypothetical witness, one lightyear away, would see this moment in one year.
The square removed was a re-enactment of an action, image and therefore moment. The aura of that image multiples through the witnesses it now collects.
A camera obscura: a way of reproducing that image again, using light and a dark room. Attempt to allow a space for a hypothetical witness – an Angelus Novus. The image of the square is always in the room, your eyes take time to adjust to that darkness. A slowing down, a wasting of time, resisting a construct of accelerated time felt through modernity.
The images you see or don’t see collect serval moments in time, or even becomes a removed space to witness these fleeting moments of time.
The RCA plywood wall with a square removed – a year.