Collection: 2016: Synthetic Nostalgia, Jonathon Downing
2016: Synthetic Nostalgia examines a year remembered through personal memory and the images that defined it, however distorted they may have become a decade later. Drawing from the pop culture icons and moments of 2016, this exhibition brings together differing cultural moments that now occupy the same collective digital archive. Political protest appears alongside a celebrity relationship, a championship exists inside of a paparazzi photograph, and a rap artist is integrated into the screen of a viral iPhone game. All of these visual elements and their individual significance compete for the same attention, reflecting the way the internet has flattened distinctions between the consequential and the trivial and delivers everything through the same screen.
“I feel like 2016 was the last year that we consistently experienced cultural events together,” Downing states. “Now we hear and see them in our own time, checking Instagram and Youtube sometimes hours or days after they happen. There can even be times when the algorithm decides when we get to learn about it, because if it views other media as more pleasing to you, it will prioritize that first.”
The paintings reconstruct this history through fragmentation and artificiality. Figures and objects are stretched, repeated and spliced together as though the images have glitched while loading or their jpeg file has become corrupted. Skin becomes excessively smooth and reflective, bodies take on a wet, plastic sheen, and familiar objects appear strangely pristine. These exaggerated surfaces borrow from the visual language now associated with AI-generated imagery and digitally manufactured perfection. At the center of the exhibition is this idea of synthetic nostalgia, which is produced somewhere between lived experience and digital reconstruction. Years of reposting, compression, editing, and algorithmic circulation make it increasingly difficult to separate the original memory from the image that has replaced it.
For Downing, this act of looking backward is also personal. Raised and based in the Metro Detroit area, he reconnects with a local audience after exhibiting his paintings internationally, bringing a body of work concerned with memory back to the place that shaped his own. He comments, “A decade ago I was in college developing my process and learning how to create things that were meaningful. While I was making this exhibition, I thought about the growth I experienced back then, and I wanted to make my paintings more dynamic than my past work. For example, with my last solo show Temporary Glory, I explored the temporary nature of success. With 2016: Synthetic Nostalgia, I have expanded the idea of impermanence to include cultural moments we all remember, and added glitches and artificial aesthetics to the distortion of my portraits. This growth is very exciting to me, and to be able to do it in Detroit means even more.”
That return mirrors the exhibition itself, which revisits something familiar after time and distance have changed the way it is seen. Rather than reconstructing the titular year exactly as it happened, 2016: Synthetic Nostalgia considers the year as it exists now. It is fragmented, romanticized, distorted, and endlessly reproduced. This exhibition ultimately asks what remains of a moment once the original experience begins to fade and its images take its place, and whether the nostalgia we feel belongs to the past itself or to the version of it we have collectively created online.