📸 Cardboard House 📸
Cardboard House is now open and will be running until 18th April. The exhibition features work by Levi de Jong (@leviwilliamdejong ), Ali Glover (@aliglover_ ), Zayd Menk (@zaydmenk ) and Zachary Merle (@zac.merle ), and was developed in collaboration with @farrellsarchitects@farrellslondon .
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Cardboard House is a tribute exhibition to the late Sir Terry Farrell, one of the UK’s most influential postmodern architects, who passed away late last year. Lisson Grove – and more specifically Hatton Street – is an area synonymous with Sir Terry Farrell. In the 1980s, he transformed the former Spitfire manufacturing site that now houses Palmer Gallery into a mixed-use complex of studios, homes, and workspaces. For more than four decades he lived above the site in a penthouse at the top of the Old Aeroworks. Today, his architectural practice continues to operate just two doors from the gallery. Farrell was predominantly known as a postmodern architect who rejected modernist austerity in favour of greater artistic expression. He was often described as counter-cultural, defined by an instinct to test and reframe architectural norms, resisting the functionalism of late modernism which sought to remove context and reduce architecture to a singular, purified form. In its place, Farrell championed buildings that were playful, symbolic, and stylistically hybrid, shaped by historical layering and a sense of place. The exhibition title, Cardboard House, references Farrell’s assertion that even a cardboard house could last forever if people were motivated to care for it. The phrase encapsulates his belief that, rather than material permanence, buildings can be sustained through collective responsibility and shared use. It similarly reflects his childlike impulse to build, and a sense that creation can be playful and provisional, treating creativity as an unfixed, iterative process which can be continuously worked and reimagined over time.
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For the exhibition preview, please DM or email [email protected] 📬
Here are a few pages from my book we published a few months ago, which I find myself still returning to just about every day. I’m incredibly proud of this work, and I’m finding it more and more important for artists’ work to live beyond the gallery walls. To circulate, to be considered, to be revisited. Meaning deepens with time, especially as so much around us feels fleeting and uncertain. This book holds years of lived experience, labor, and questions that shaped me long before it existed. It comes from a moment where everyday life in America feels increasingly fragile, where shared symbols can either divide us or remind us of what we still hold in common. For now, it feels right to sit with it, to keep returning to it, and to let the work keep doing its job. I have about 20 copies left if you’d like to grab one. Link in bio.
Sharing segments from my book ‘Making America.’ The publication brings together my recent exhibition in London, along with the paintings, sculptures, and texts that constitute the exhibition. It functions as a visual and textual survey of my practice, tracing recurring materials and symbols tied to nationalism, religion, and cultural identity.
The book includes writing by multiple voices, including a foreword written by me and curatorial text by Akshay Sharma, who also curated the exhibition in London. Together, the texts frame the work as an ongoing inquiry rather than a fixed statement.
Designed by Joel Dent, the book was produced as an edition of 100 hand-made copies by Gasoline Press.
We recently just launched the book through a private presentation in New York, curated by Sean Koons, alongside new works including ‘Flag;’ paintings and ‘Shovel.’ Thank you to everyone who had a hand in bringing this to life. †
#levidejong
‘Making America’
second book, finally finished.
part documentation, part reflection.
my work, my roots, and a show in london.
hand-bound in kentucky by gasoline press.
edition of 100.
available on my website.
#levidejong
‘Shovel; Self-Portrait,’ 2025
Forged-iron, wooden handle
62 x 8-¾ in
157 × 22.2 cm
‘Shovel’ is part of my new body of work, “American Made.” I have been entrenched in the labor force since I was 10, I have always asked myself, who is this all really for?
I am working through the mythos of labor, industry, national pride. Continuing the dialogue born in “Making America,” this body of work turns its gaze toward the objects and gestures that shape our understanding of American exceptionalism, as well as the capital and consumer systems that quietly sustain it.
The work centers on tools and rituals deeply embedded in blue-collar life. Once practical and functional, these objects now appear as trophies, disconnected from the hands that used them and absorbed into the aesthetics of success.
Mirror-polished and meticulously fabricated, they hover between celebration and critique, exposing a tension between who builds and who benefits.
In this world of surface and repetition, form begins to mirror belief.
The reflection is not incidental; it implicates. It asks: What does it mean to be American? What am I working toward? Who am I working for, and what am I left with?
This is not nostalgia. These are not artifacts of pride, but instruments of pressure. Their presence reveals an absence: the disappearance of the worker behind the spectacle of success. The system is glimpsed only in fragments, elevated on plinths, cast in contradiction, and polished into myth.
This is not a showroom of triumph but a stage where labor and illusion quietly collide. It does not preach, but instead asks what we have already bought into and what we are still being sold.
#levidejong
