600 West Walnut Street
Danville, KY 40422
(859) 238-5959
Website: centre.edu
Hours: Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
A Double System
Featuring Jonathan Vega
Website: @vega.tiff
Dates: November 5- December 12, 2025
Events: N/A
Jonathan Vega is a photo-based artist born and raised in Chicago, IL. Vega’s work explores questions of power and photography’s dual capacity to honor and repress, with a focus on carceral indexes and aesthetics. Vega has served as the Gallery Coordinator for Denison Art Space in Newark and has taught at The Ohio State University, Elgin Community College, and Saint Mary’s College. He earned his BFA from Denison University and his MFA in Studio Art/Photography from The Ohio State University. His work has been included in exhibitions at Moreau Gallery in Notre Dame, The Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries in Dayton, and, most recently, The Sculpture Center in Cleveland. Vega currently lives and works in Chicago.
In The Body and the Archive, Allan Sekula describes portraiture as “a double system: a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively.” This concept serves as the foundation for Jonathan Vega’s exhibition, A Double System.
A Double System engages with two distinct photographic archives. The first acknowledges the democratization of photography and its accessibility to the middle class, allowing individuals to document their own narratives. In this honorific collection, Vega draws from personal family albums, presenting images of relatives in a manner reminiscent of their display in a family home—an homage to photography’s role in preserving personal and communal memory.
The second archive, by contrast, reveals the repressive function of photography. It consists of mugshots presented in the format of a rogues’ gallery. Sourced from digital records, these images are transformed through darkroom processing onto aluminum plates, evoking the visual language of tintypes. Unlike the intimate family photographs, these images exist in the public domain, branding their subjects as inherently criminal. By referencing tintypes, Vega invokes the historical origins of the mugshot—deeply connected to the pseudosciences of physiognomy and eugenics, systems that disproportionately targeted immigrants and people of color.
Unifying these two archives is an excerpt from the Cook County Jail’s website, sourced in 2021, which underscores the broader societal context of the work:
“On any given day, up to a third of those incarcerated at Cook County Jail suffer from some form of mental illness, making the jail the largest mental health hospital in Illinois—and one of the largest in the country.”
Though deeply personal and familial, A Double System speaks to a wider societal reality: the criminalization of mental illness in the United States. The exhibition gives visual form to Sekula’s concept, showing how portraiture operates simultaneously as a tool of commemoration and control.