JON.E.B. is a writer and self-taught mixed-media artist from the Black Hills of South Dakota, now based in Portland, Oregon. His work challenges how place and space are defined and remembered, engaging themes of memory and identity, urban entropy and authority, ecological harm and repair, domestic myth, and belonging. The work is materially driven and deliberately physical—mark-making that foregrounds process through addition, erasure, layering, and abrasion, keeping the act of making visible while questioning the conventions of visual culture.
He works primarily on back-framed, repurposed wood panels for their capacity to hold transferred emotion. Scratches, gouges, seams, and scars are not surface effects but structural evidence—records of time, touch, and thought embedded into the work itself. Most pieces are accompanied by a concise prose text or story, written in parallel with the visual work, extending the narrative beyond the surface rather than explaining it.
Chaos is embraced over rigid structure. The imagery emerges from fragmented, intrusive visions—sudden flashes pulled from vivid dreams, buried memories, and imagined states that surface without warning. Through reduction and collision, the unnecessary is stripped away, allowing raw consciousness and lived experience to intersect, unravel, and reconfigure into something new.
The process is immersive and cyclical: discovering, distilling, reshaping—until the boundary between representation and emotion dissolves. Using a fusion of traditional and unconventional materials, tools, and techniques, the work is driven by the belief that there are no mistakes, only perceptions. Method is treated as a construct—something to be discovered, tested, and ultimately dismantled.
