installation view
There’s a particular kind of exhibition that feels like the charged remnants of an idea mid-eruption — where trying to describe the experience in 500 words seems not just inadequate but futile, like being asked to summarize the American Experiment on the back of a grocery receipt. Leon Jones’ latest solo outing, “Camouflaged: Hidden in Plain Sight” at Studios Inc, is firmly in that category. Which is to say: the whole enterprise of review-writing here is a fool’s errand. And yet, here I am, attempting to distill a show that resists distillation, the way certain proteins resist folding — or the way Americans resist talking earnestly about race until that uncle brings it up at Thanksgiving.
Jones — resident artist, cultural spelunker, and part-time archaeologist of the American psyche — uses this exhibition to deepen his ongoing excavation of the hairline fractures running beneath (and through) what we like to imagine is a shared national narrative. Moving through the gallery feels less like viewing a show and more like wandering a bureaucratic archive ransacked by history itself: documents everywhere, testimonies half-legible, meaning leaking out in multiple directions. A dizzying black and white kaleidoscope.
His tributes to and takedowns of American cultural and artistic superheroes permeate the space. A pitiful, vacuum-sealed American flag belted to a Jasper Johns-like substrate evokes Ed Bereal with all the subtlety of a flare gun. Is it an offering? An indictment? A kind of aesthetic cosplay? There’s a whiff of Danh Danh Võ’s slyness, too, in the way Jones repurposes the symbolic residue of American power, suggesting that sometimes meaning must be rebuilt from the very debris that once oppressed you.
The show’s ribcage is “Untitled,” (2025), an installation staged like the Last Supper with 12 Gothic chairs (13 minus one — either an obvious biblical wink at treason or a cosmic joke). Before them lies a plywood sarcophagus of a table strewn with “whitewashed” found and made objects: busted cast limbs, roller skates, toy rifles, cultural detritus bleached into anonymity. The whole thing reads like America lying in state — which sounds melodramatic until you’re standing there and realize melodrama is simply what happens when history turns uncomfortably real.
An offset grid of 36 Judd-like chairs faces the tableau devotionally, as if Minimalism discovered religion and chose plywood as its scripture. On the neighboring walls, monochromatic furniture fragments hover like hunting trophies — somewhere between glyph and ghost — faintly spelling out something you can’t decipher but somehow are intrinsically familiar. Jones calls them “family portraits.” But plywood, in Jones’s hands, isn’t just a material; it’s a metaphor wearing work boots. Composite, humble, ubiquitous — an American substance turned truth serum. Visitors sit, perch, activate. Suddenly you’re not in an exhibition so much as trudging across a psychological terrain that’s equal parts funerary, prickly and commonly known.
Sound permeates the rooms: a sludgy National Anthem (composed in concert with Andy McKenzie) drifts inexplicably from three hand-hewn, Rietveld-style chairs like a track played underwater during the final seconds of an empire. It doesn’t accuse so much as linger, waiting for you to indict yourself.
And then there are the hands — white, directional, Escheresque—pointing everywhere and nowhere, absurd punctuation marks in a narrative without a clear ending. Guideposts? Warnings? Socratic inquiry disguised as nonchalance?? They remind us that the path forward is also backward and sideways, all at once.
Which is precisely why the show matters. It doesn’t tidy the mess. It doesn’t offer solutions. It simply hands you the debris and asks you to sit with it. Leon Jones is a future classic, and one of our sharpest cultural commentators working nearby today. I only wish I had 500 more words.
“Camouflaged: Hidden in Plain Sight” by Leon Jones continues at Studios Inc, 1708 Campbell St., through Dec. 27. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and 5 to 8 p.m. First Fridays. For more information 816.994.7134 or www.studiosinc.org.
