MoCP - Darkroom 2023

Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk, b. 1964), A Mamalelekala Landscape, 2013 

In his North American Landscape series, Tom Jones creates images that satirize photographs made by Edward Curtis (United States, 1868–1952) of Indigenous populations in his iconic North American Indian book of 1907. Jones’s images feature plastic toys that match trees found in the backgrounds of Curtis’s images to comment on how we teach histories and stories of the land to children. Each image is titled with the name of the tribe belonging to the region where a specific tree grows, revealing the many Indigenous groups and identities that have been flattened into one idea of “Indian-ness” over time. 

Tom Jones completed his BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA at Columbia College Chicago (2002). He has shown his works in several exhibitions, and in 2022, the Museum of Wisconsin Art presented a retrospective of his work. His works are currently included in the collections at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; the Chazen Museum of Art, WI; the Nerman Museum, KS; and Michigan State University Museum, among others. He is currently Assistant Professor of Photography in the Art Department at UW-Madison. His work was featured in the 2022-2023 MoCP exhibition Refracting Histories.

https://www.tomjonesho-chunk.com/