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Jon Baker


 
Mark




Photographic artist, Jon Baker, has exhibited work with the Serpentine Gallery, Parasol Unit and Catlin Prize. He is known for highly intricate and detailed artworks which explore ideas of human power, fallibility and culturally prescribed ideas of beauty. His photographs are made using a self-crafted camera that reproduces small objects at a large scale. Using this bespoke camera, which he refers to as a Macro Obscura, Jon is able to expose unique, analogue photographs at over two metres in length which produces a rarely experienced photographic quality that give his subjects a unique presence.

Such subjects include plants, insects and sweets that he has modified in order to disrupt the objects’ cultural meanings. One example is that, Jon chews jellied sweets, leaving teeth marks and saliva on them. This, alongside their unnatural scale, changes the innocent and childlike qualities of them. The subjects are often displayed inside grid-like structures made from glass and plastic. These contain and divide the subject, bringing a sense of order and restraint to the organic objects, whilst melding hard and soft. Jon displays his artworks in surreal photographic installations creating an environment, that through scale and opposing visual ideas, make the audience confront their own physical mutability.


He aims for the recognisable to be made unexpected through his photographic techniques and installations. Jon believes that encountering small objects at a scale proportionate to the human body within his photographic installations, changes the viewer’s relationship to both the subjects and themselves. The result is that Jon’s artwork delivers known ideas of beauty, but monstrously altered; the familiar made uncanny.














Exhibitions

The Idealist and the Contrarian Serpentine Cinema 2019

Piss,Plants, Plastic,  2018

Magic Control,  2017

Catlin Art Prize Finalist 2015


ART 15 UAL 

Photofusion, Solo show, February 2015

Inclusion in Catlin Guide 2015

Art for youth 2014

Saatchi Sensations, 2014

Exposure 14 Award, Parasol unit, 2014

Final show at Chelsea College 2014