Making America / Levi De Jong

A promise of a once-realised unity, it rests powerless on the walls, stripped of its integrity. Fragmented in its composition, it survives only as a deconstructed dream. In his inaugural solo exhibition at General Assembly in London, Iowa-raised artist Levi De Jong confronts the remains of the American flag, not as a symbol of pride, but as a fractured relic. The rust-coloured tones that dominate the paintings seem to trap, on their surfaces, the last remnants of a cohesion long corroded, oxidised into dust. Dust that binds itself to frames. Dust that stitches itself into jagged seams, into the scraped, wounded texture that alludes to the same society this emblem once vowed to unify.

Acting the Matter
Bitumen, aluminium, tar, rubber: harsh in character, industrial materials brought together by artist Levi De Jong cooperate in an act of dissent against a narrative they didn’t choose but by which they were subjected. Their union reveals what lingers today of the American Dream: not hope, but its hollowed carcass. An aesthetic form becomes an indictment. An icon emptied of any trace of sacrality. A symbol worn thin by overuse, dissected now through a minimalist language that, inherent to such a geographic area, refuses sentimentality and confronts blind faith.

Drained Materials, Emptied Symbol
These salvaged components, already scarred, are given a second life, becoming spokesmen of toil, endurance, and dispossession. They speak of a working class once mythologised, then drained by history of its dignity. That same class, the true backbone of the society they belong to, now seeks to distance itself from a narrative long dictated by patriotic myth-making. Once cast as passive participants in the national drama, these silent heroes have been consumed by dominant ideology. Now, they are ready to revise the script, to rise anew from wreckage.

“An aesthetic form becomes an indictment”

Traces
Scratches and abrasions, marks born of repetition, become signs in their own fight, consumed in faceless anonymity. Like a ritual of reckoning and a form of self-inflicted penance, the scorched bitumen suffocates the passive surface, stretched taut across canvas. Rigid and unmoving, the paintings rise as mute witnesses, unyielding before the violence they hold and the traumas they recall. Their very fabrication, hardened by fire, conjures a narrative of collapse. And yet, amid that destruction, there flickers the possibility of renewal. As if obliterating the symbol might prepare the ground for something less corrupted to take root.

“Fragments are layered, textures forced into relation”

Abusing Mythology
This same fire-based alchemy is applied to paper, singed and blackened to portray a rake, a riding boot, a turbine. These shapes summon the American Midwest—the so-called heartland—where De Jong was raised. The fractures of this terrain are etched into the artist’s memory and transposed onto canvases that echo the legacy of American flag iconography in contemporary art. From Jasper Johns to Claes Oldenburg, yet De Jong suggests that the act of deconstruction has always carried within it the seeds of reconstruction: a chance to rebuild meaning from the ruins. Today, more than ever, that impulse feels urgent: not merely to reinterpret, but to dismantle what no longer serves, and make space for something less corrupted to emerge.

Unworthy Requiem
Right and Left are the titles of two canvases anchoring the exhibition at General Assembly. Around them orbit other works loaded in nationalistic allusions: Oath, Love, Unity, Valor, Justice, and Liberty. De Jong constructs a visual language where materials control the vocabulary, while stitched seams act as syntax. Fragments are layered, textures forced into relation. For De Jong, the American flag no longer sings its swan song. It is already buried. And yet, from the soil it once drained, it still finds ways to perpetuate violence, to ignite wars, to support genocides. The stars and stripes may be fading, and the corpse of a dream that doesn’t deserve a requiem may lie underground, but that dead body continues to poison the world above.

Photo by Hunter Amos / @hunteramosstudio