Jason Hughes (US)

Jason Hughes is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on sculpture, drawing, and print media. For the last several years his research has focused on the history of American economic power and its influence over cultural representation in the United States. His creative practice is quite diverse including textiles, collages, and cast sculptures from shredded currency; a series of large scale prints that are ornate abstract composites of money; and sculptural objects from appropriated street barricades used for crowd control. His process and the product of his labor address issues of high and low craft, production and trade, as well as shifts in representation and the perception of value.

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Hughes’s ongoing series of limited edition print works titled Devil in the Details are created by digitally deconstructing various world currencies. Utilizing the fine details found in the filigree, text, and textures of money he creates large-scale collages, thus transforming the compositions of the world’s currency into ornate geometric abstractions. The patterns Hughes creates have a multitude of cross-cultural reference points, ranging from Western Modernism to Islamic Art; Persian rugs to camouflage; transcendentalism to consumer culture. In so doing, Hughes examines the psychological capital of currency by transforming something so ubiquitous into a nearly unrecognizable abstraction of itself.