Name: “Disrupted Landscapes” & “Tin Gods” Artist Talks with jonCates, Jason Cole Mager, & Duncan Mountford
Start: 2025-02-23T15:00:00+08:00
End: 2025-02-23T17:00:00+08:00
Location: 新店路110號, Xindian, New Taipei City, Taiwan

$\u201cDisrupted Landscapes\u201d & \u201cTin Gods\u201d Artist Talks with jonCates, Jason Cole Mager, & Duncan Mountford$

Please join us for artist talks with jonCates, Jason Cole Mager, and Duncan Mountford as they share the ideas and concepts behind their work for our concurrent shows, “Disrupted Landscapes” and “Tin Gods”.

The talks will be in English, all are welcome!
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Duncan Mountford Solo Show: Tin Gods
jonCates & Jason Cole Mager: Disrupted Landscapes
January 4 – March 2, 2025
Viewings by appointment outside of scheduled events
Press release: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1G1dBr3miEab0ta1ZxMFaTcNsbWO3egqA?usp=sharing
Project Space 110 新店藝術空間 is pleased to present our first curatorial projects: Disrupted Landscapes, a two-person show by jonCates and Jason Cole Mager in our Main Room; and Tin Gods, a solo show by Duncan Mountford in the Back Room. The artists in these two concurrent exhibitions use their family histories as launching points in combination with deep understanding of their respective artistic mediums to explore the intricate layers of societal, geographical, and personal histories embedded in current local and geopolitical shifts.
Disrupted Landscapes brings together the work of American artists jonCates — a pioneer of digital glitch art — and Jason Cole Mager, who through his painting practice has long explored his identity in tandem with that of Taiwan’s colonial history. Both originally from the Midwestern United States, Cates and Mager now consider Taiwan their long-term home, having lived in Taipei for several years. Cates presents work using glitch techniques to disrupt digital files that in this exhibition, portray the American Midwest landscape with surprisingly painterly quality. Through the glitch genre, Cates probes the paradox of the landscape he grew up with — one of vast natural beauty intrinsically tied to a violent settler-colonial history. Focusing on the major geopolitical entities that have exerted power over Taiwan, Mager layers historical symbols in his paintings that reference the United States and former imperial powers of Japan and dynastic China. Of his work, Mager says, “These are history paintings that may appear as nothing more than decoration or wallpaper if one is not intimately familiar with the historical significance of the symbols.” While Cates deconstructs US settler-colonial history through his digital landscapes, and Mager explores the layers of colonization that form Taiwanese history through paint, both artists probe socio-historical-political frameworks through deceptively beautiful use of technique in their respective mediums — a commentary in and of itself on the care required when interpreting history beyond the broad narratives often told.
In Duncan Mountford’s solo show, Tin Gods, Mountford uses the term “context explosion” to describe his practice at the intersection of sculpture, drawing, writing, and installation. In a new body of work, Mountford presents three sculptures from his “Tin Gods” series of triptych cabinets, and an artist book of ink and watercolor drawings. Resembling altarpieces from Mountford’s Roman Catholic upbringing, the Tin Gods are sculptural curiosity cabinets containing model interiors alluding to a breadth of references ranging from theatrical spaces to old science-fiction television, occult stories to weapons development, ruins that litter cities, and dream spaces at the edge of nightmares and dystopian futures. The wings of these triptych altarpieces portray scenes that suggest an unknown timepoint in which nature has ultimately taken over. In what Mountford describes as a “sense of a world that resonates with ghosts from the future,” Tin Gods captures our current historical moment of unstated narratives leading to multiple, potentially foreboding futures — of which the presence of humanity and its role is unclear.
About the artists:
Duncan Mountford was born in Liverpool, UK to a working-class, Roman Catholic family. He studied Art Foundation in Liverpool, and received a BA in Fine Art in Coventry in 1976. Mountford holds an MA in Sculpture from the Winchester School of Art and completed a PhD in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University with his dissertation titled, “The Investigation of the Museum as a Site of Control, Memory and Loss by Expression in Installation and Sculptural Form.” In addition to his studio practice, Mountford has worked as a community artist, painter of murals, exhibition technician and handler, curator, and university professor. Mountford has taught at numerous institutions and held shows widely throughout Europe and Asia, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the prestigious Taipei National University of the Arts, a post he has held since 2013.
Jason Cole Mager is an American artist based in Taipei, Taiwan. Originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, he earned his BFA from Herron School of Art and Design, followed by a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Mager has exhibited throughout the United States and Asia, with recent solo shows in Taipei at 99 Degrees Art Center (99度藝術中心) and Shalom Shalom (你好沙龍), and features in the Taipei Times for his exploration of Taiwan's political and cultural history. Mager’s art functions as contemporary history painting, with symbols that carry deeper meaning related to Taiwan's colonial past. He believes that while history can be tragic, it should foster unity and inform both art and society. Mager relocated to Taipei in 2013 and in 2016, was awarded an Artist Visa by the Taiwanese government. He has since spent the past several years developing his practice in the context of embracing Taiwanese culture.
jonCates is a pioneering scholar and artist in the field of Glitch Art. From the renowned Ars Electronica Festival in Austria to the Museum of Moving Image in New York, as well as the art organization Rhizome in New York, Cates has extensive curatorial and exhibition experience in global digital art markets. Taiwan's largest and most widely known contemporary art publications, Today Art (ARTCO) and ARTouch, have written: "Jon Cates' Ghost Town uses glitch art media to engage with social phenomena and offers alternative ways to discuss contemporary visual aesthetics." His work in the Glitch Art genre explores haunting, chaotic, and enigmatic technological images, reflecting the illusions and conflicts of the American West's development. As a professor at several international new media and media arts departments, Cates previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and founded the new media core curriculum at SAIC. This program is now one of the top five new media departments in the United States, according to rankings of the best fine arts schools in the country.
About Project Space 110 新店藝術空間:
Project Space 110 is a new, non-commercial and artist-run gallery located in the Xindian district of New Taipei City, Taiwan — by the scenic Bitan riverside. Our physical and digital spaces aim to promote experimental work by local artists dedicated to their practice, and foster connections between the diverse art communities we engage with in Taiwan and abroad. Our ground floor gallery consists of a street-facing Main Room, Back Room, and additional smaller experimental spaces. The upper floors house the art studios of gallery co-founders Jocelyn Shu, Tim Budden, and Dang Yang. Project Space 110 is by appointment outside of scheduled events ([email protected]; Instagram: @space110_gallery) and located by Xindian MRT station green line.