Jonas Becker

BA, 2004, Smith College, Northampton, MA; MFA, 2010, University of California, Irvine, CA; 2007, Coro Fellowship in Public Policy and Leadership, Pittsburgh, PA. Exhibitions: Actual Size Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA. Publications: On Curating, Issue 31, "Spheres of Estrangement: Art, Politics, and Curating" (co-editor). Bibliography: New Museum/MIT Press, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility; Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles Weekly; Art Practical; Artillery; Art Ltd; Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles; KCRW, Art Talk; National Public Radio, Morning Edition. Awards: Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA; Saas-Fee Summer Art Institute, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland; Heart of Los Angeles Artist Residency, Los Angeles, CA; Transart Summer Residency, Berlin, Germany; Six Points Fellowship.

My work explores how beliefs form around specific sites and geographies. I am interested in these landscapes as an intersection of personal identity, cultural mythologies, and political power; each of my projects examines a particular narrative born of this intersection. My most recent projects focus on rural America, questioning what is "natural" and the relationship between humans, technology, and the environment.

I work primarily in photography and video installation, incorporating participatory components into my process. My works combine the visual rhetorics of different mediums and contexts, such as youtube video, advertising, documentary film, public practice, and conceptual artwork, to fuse fictional and nonfictional elements. By layering these social, physical, and cinematic mediums, my projects highlight the operations of conventional narratives and create the possibility for remixing the beliefs we form around land.