Actual Size Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of video and sculpture from artist Jonas Becker. The ongoing series Same Rock uses mountain landscapes as a cipher for the relationship between humans, technology, and the environment. In Untitled Topographies bas relief sculptures of the most traveled to mountain ranges are presented like minimalist objects, devoid of any information that conveys scale, location, or elevation.  These works become surfaces for the viewer to project their perceptions of the landscape. Holographic Mountain takes this prompt a step further. The video is set in Helvetia, West Virginia, a ‘Little Switzerland’ in Appalachia founded on its similarity to the Alps. Since the town's founding, its local peaks have been systematically leveled through mountaintop removal coal mining. Disembodied voices propose to remedy the effects of mountaintop removal by projecting holographic Alps in place of the former summits. The works sleek animation and voiceovers borrow from corporate design and political rhetoric to evoke the vastly different mountain economies of Appalachia and Switzerland. The works in Same Rock explore myths of universality, aesthetic deception, and the politics and economics of the artist's home state of West Virginia in order to highlight the inconceivable yet all too real effects of mining on the landscape and its residents.

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Jonas Becker was born in Morgantown, WV, and lives and works Los Angeles, CA.  Becker holds an MFA from UC Irvine and a BA from Smith College. The artist has exhibited internationally, most recently in solo shows at the Craft & Folk Art Museum, LAXART, and Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles, and the Lancaster Museum of Art & History. Residencies include the Heart of Los Angeles, Montalvo Arts Center, and Saas-Fee Summer Institute. Grants include the Berman Foundation, Center for Global Peace Studies, and Nazarian Foundation and Six Points Fellowship. Becker is founding director of the Mobile Pinhole Project, an organization that uses a giant, mobile pinhole camera to bring photography workshops to children in neighborhoods across Los Angeles. Becker has served as an Visiting Assistant Professor at Scripps College and is an Assistant Professor at The School of the Art Institute Chicago.

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