Jonathan Treviño (b. 1989) is a mestizo American artist who uses contemporary iconography and art history to address our relationships to consumer objects,media, issues of gendered consumption, and art culture while drawing from elements of twentieth century art and consumer society to investigate American cultural desire at large, family life, and queer identity as they intersect with and arise out of Western philosophy,religion, and notions of law.

While investigating the generational effects of christianity and law on family relationships, particularly between parents, children, and LGBTQ individuals, his works explore the construction of American identity and the absurdity of the quest for self-perfection represented in glamour and luxury as extensions of colonial religious values and notions of The New in art through works ranging from installation and performance to found object sculptures and portrait photography. His art works act as expressive pathways toward understanding the numinous reveries of city life and ancestral memories about the worlds we used to live in; spiritual experiences which reveal themselves to us in solitude, in sleep, and in the city after dark.

He received a BFA with Honors in Photography from Parsons The New School for Design's Art, Media, and Technology program in 2013, while concurrently studying philosophy, jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and working in NYC as a fashion photography assistant for clients such as Vogue, Dazed Magazine, CLASH, Sephora, and Nike.His award winning art-house short film, BLUE SWEEP has screened regionally and internationally, premiering at the Tobin Center for Performing Arts as part of the SAFilm Festival, shortly after receiving the Texas Vision award at the South Texas Underground Film Festival,Drafthouse, Corpus Christi, selected for the Oaxaca Film Festival, Mexico, as well as screening across thirty cities in Romania as part of the SHORT to the Point Film Festival before being selected as a featured artist to screen at Hemisfair, San Antonio for Luminaria 2019.

“ The reveries, instincts, and meditations of the mestizo proletariat reveal how we may continue to access our connection to earth and the human unconscious, beyond the spiritual traumas of the American media landscape, in order to understand and love each other and our lives."

After four years living and working in New York City, he returned to San Antonio with a new found love and understanding of his hometown, its history, and people, with the ultimate goal of uplifting his community and city to international status as an art and film hub, recognizing his city of origin as a place with a unique message and voice that, with enough support, exposure, and funding would contribute to the narrative of American art in a way which is integral to that history but yet to be fully understood in academia and popular culture at large. 

Statement

My work is an investigation into the manifold meanings and etymological history of praxis as expressed through aesthetics and symbolic language, wherein concrete historical persons have sought to recreate themselves , as if upon an object, toward notions of liberation or transcendence up to present day, where praxis-based theories of digital change render persons deriving their value from the virtual ability to turn themselves into instruments of their own liberation via access to and creation of shared memory content, rooted in seemingly self-guided, fantasy narratives which parallel inherited Western philosophies about the true, the beautiful, and the good; as reinforced by art history.