Gabriel Jones: I'm Inside: Tagging Architecture in Eastern European Cold War Propaganda Postcards

By Gabriel Jones

Superimposing contemporary graffiti tags onto Soviet architecture postcards, Jones' photomontages invoke a perpetual form of resistance to government superstructures

Through a mashup of mid-century state-sanctioned brutalist architecture and contemporary undercover graffiti tags, artist photographer Gabriel Jones remixes Soviet postcards of the 20th century into photomontages with an updated message. Top-down meets grassroots and sublime and subliminal clash in these kitschy collages: sometimes cynical, sometimes cheeky, sometimes profound. Each structure gains a slogan such as "Honk if you don't exist"; "Make Orwell fiction again"; "Microsoft is a crazy thing to name your company"; and "Communist jokes are only funny if everyone gets them." Such decontextualization provides a humorous effect, but also brings a sort of recognizability to the new image on the postcard. This dynamic shows humanity's innate resilience to imposed superstructures--be it only in our minds or among our communities--which in turn lends itself to a mirror by which to view the superstructures imposed by contemporary politicians.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9083579573
• ISBN13: 9789083579573
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Set Margins' Publications
• Length: 140 Pages