Artist Levi de Jong reimagines the American flag in his solo show "Making America" at General Assembly, using industrial materials to explore identity, labor, and national symbolism through tactile abstraction.
Levi de Jong's recent solo exhibition,"Making America" at General Assembly in London, reimagined the American flag, exploring variations of the charged national symbol through tactile abstraction. Working with materials drawn from his upbringing in Iowa's industrial heartland, he deconstructs the star-spangled banner to expose layers of labor, ideology, and identity. Speaking with Whitewall, de Jong shares how abstraction and materiality help strip away nationalistic noise, inviting viewers to engage with the flag not as propaganda, but as a site of personal and collective reckoning. His work draws on pop culture, religious imagery, and working-class iconography to question what it means to belong in a country shaped by contradiction. The result is a quiet yet forceful meditation on resilience, disillusionment, and the evolving meaning of American identity.
WW: Your recent solo exhibition, Making America, at General Assembly in London, explores deeply personal narratives through the reimagined iconography of the American flag. How did the process of distilling such a potent national symbol into minimal forms help you uncover new meanings in it?
LEVI DE JONG: It was never my goal to uncover anything specific from the beginning. My process always starts with a question, and that question usually comes through the material. The materials I work with-bitumen, rubber, enamel-are inherently loaded. They carry the weight of utility, labor, and memory. They're drawn from the spaces that shaped me: places where things were made, fixed, and held together.
"My process always starts with a question, and that question usually comes through the material,"
Levi de Jong
When I approached the flag, I didn't set out to critique it or elevate it. I just wanted to depict it honestly, through the lens of those materials. I think I was trying to strip something away, though I didn't yet know what. That act of reduction, breaking the flag down into stripes, fields, and muted surfaces, became a way of revealing the image rather than defining it.
In the end, distilling the flag to its essential form allowed me to remove some of its prescribed narratives. By reducing it, and in some ways rebuilding it, the work found new life. It began to breathe. That clarity made room for reflection, for projection, for viewers to bring their own meanings to it. I think once you take away the noise of nationalism, the symbol becomes human again.
Tactile Connections and a Powerful Visual Language
WW: Your materials, including silicon, bitumen, enamel, are imbued with memories of your upbringing in Iowa's heartland. Can you speak to the tactile connection between these materials and your own sense of place?
LDJ: I grew up around these materials. I remember wandering my grandparents' farm, stepping over rusted tools in the grass, piles of sheet metal, and old machinery. Most weekends were spent chopping wood, tearing down barns, or building them back up. The materials had a use, a weight, and a cost. That cost was my time and labor, and for a long time, I resented it.
These materials weren't symbolic. They were made for industry. When I went on to study in Italy, surrounded by classical techniques and refined materials, I tried to distance myself from that world. I rejected where I came from and what I knew. But eventually, I returned to it with a new perspective. I began to see potential in what had always been there.
These industrial materials became personal again. I understood how they moved, how they resisted, and how far they could be pushed. My earliest curiosities began there, in the material itself. I know their foundational truths, and now I can rework them, push them further, and use them to depict something more.
They carry my story and the stories of many others-a story of labor, of making things last, of trying to build a better life. It's not just about my past, but about a broader American reality. These are the materials of people who work hard to support families, to stay afloat, to hold things together. By giving these materials a new voice, I hope to give a voice to the people behind them-those whose labor has shaped not just landscapes, but the country itself.
"By giving these materials a new voice, I hope to give a voice to the people behind them,"
Levi de Jong
WW: You draw from a visual language rooted in American iconography, religious symbolism, and pop culture. How do you see abstraction as a means to bridge these different influences?
LDJ: Abstraction lets me work with familiar symbols without being confined to their fixed meanings. I'm not interested in replicating an image or icon. My focus is to break it down to its most essential form, allowing me to heighten its purest qualities. In doing so, I often discover a new way of seeing.
Many of these symbols, whether national, religious, or commercial, have always coexisted in the environments I grew up in. American symbolism, religious imagery, and popular culture were never separate categories. Abstraction allows me to hold them together without collapsing them into one. It gives me the room to examine how these systems overlap and what they quietly reinforce.
I'm not looking for resolution. I'm trying to create just enough friction for something new to come through-something quieter, more honest. This is why I think abstraction is so powerful. It strips away the binary and the trivial. It distills experience to its most essential truth, and in doing so, it reveals a through line that somehow feels truer than true.
Titles as Talismans and Encouraging New Perspectives
WW: In this new body of work, the titles Valor, Unity, Love, Justice almost function as talismans. How do these guiding principles inform your creative decisions and the overall narrative of that underpins your flags?
LDJ: There are two smaller flags in the show as well, titled Left and Right, which comically nod to our current political divisions. The rest of the works take on titles like Valor, Unity, Love, and Justice-words that have been used so often in political rhetoric, branding, and ceremony that they've started to feel hollow. I grew up hearing these words in church, at school, and during pledges. They were plastered on billboards, repeated in speeches, and absorbed without much question. With this body of work, I wanted to hold those words still for a moment and really look at them.
These are the kinds of values that were supposedly at the foundation of the country. In God We Trust. One nation under God. We pledge allegiance to this flag. But when you start to look back at history-and at the present-it's hard not to ask whether those ideals were ever actually meant to be upheld. Whether they were ever truly intended for everyone. It seems not.
So the titles operate less like statements and more like questions. Can a work still carry the weight of Justice if it's built from tar, silicon, and staples? What does Unity feel like when the surface is uneven and scarred? I'm not trying to offer answers. I'm letting each word sit on the composition, part framework, part contradiction.
"I'm letting each word sit on the composition, part framework, part contradiction,"
Levi de Jong
They're not instructions, and they're not meant to signal virtue. They act more like pressure points. The viewer can feel their presence, but they have to decide for themselves what still holds meaning. For me, it's an attempt to reclaim the language-not to restore it, but to test whether it can still hold something real.
WW: Your practice, which appropriates an inherently nationalist symbol, both challenges established narratives and encourages viewers to look beyond them. Within the context of today's polarized climate, what do you hope visitors will take away from this exhibition?
LDJ: The flag is one of the most loaded symbols we have. It's used to represent pride, protest, identity, fear, and allegiance. Everyone sees it differently, and everyone brings something to it. I'm not interested in telling people how they should feel about it. I'm more interested in slowing it down and flipping it just enough so that people might see it in a new light.
I'm not trying to erase the flag or reject it. I'm trying to open it up. Through material-based abstraction, I use blue-collar materials to depict these symbols, which carry the weight of labor and infrastructure. For me, they reflect a more grounded version of American life-one shaped by working life, resilience, and contradiction. By reworking the flag through these materials, I'm trying to shift it away from ideology and toward lived experience, to ask what it really means to contribute, to belong, to be part of this country.
In such a polarized climate, I hope people leave with more questions than conclusions. If the work holds any power, I think it's in that space between recognition and uncertainty, where a symbol becomes less about what it's supposed to say and more about what it might still be able to represent.
WW: The American flag has long been both a unifying emblem and a flashpoint for division. How does your work reframe that tension to offer an alternative vision of collective identity?
LDJ: The flag carries both pride and pain. For some, it represents freedom and opportunity. For others, it stands for exclusion, control, and violence. That contradiction is built into it, and it's something I try to confront directly in the work.
