Gabriel Jones: I m Inside: Tagging Architecture in Eastern European Cold War Propaganda Postcards (Hardcover)

Superimposing contemporary graffiti tags onto Soviet architecture postcards Jones photomontages invoke a perpetual form of resistance to government superstructures Through a mashup of mid-century state-sanctioned brutalist architecture and contemporary undercover graffiti tags artist photographer Gabriel Jones remixes Soviet postcards of the 20th century into photomontages with an updated message. Top-down meets grassroots and sublime and subliminal clash in these kitschy collages: sometimes cynical sometimes cheeky sometimes profound. Each structure gains a slogan such as Honk if you don t exist ; Make Orwell fiction again ; Microsoft is a crazy thing to name your company ; and Communist jokes are only funny if everyone gets them. Such decontextualization provides a humorous effect but also brings a sort of recognizability to the new image on the postcard. This dynamic shows humanity s innate resilience to imposed superstructures--be it only in our minds or among our communities--which in turn lends itself to a mirror by which to view the superstructures imposed by contemporary politicians.