Jonathan's profile
I was born and raised amongst the rural hills of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Since graduating from Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA in 2006 with a degree in Studio Art, I have lived and exhibited in New York City and Baltimore, Maryland. In May of this past year, I received my Masters of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
My first truly visceral artistic experiences as a child were not in the halls of some great art museum but amongst the displays and dioramas of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. It is these narratives and explorations of science that began to shape and contextualize my understanding of the physical world around me. It is through the studies of biology, astronomy, physics and geology that I use as the starting point for all of my artwork.
Formally, my work explores the tension created by the presence of fragility and the temporary. As an installation sculptor I am interested in where things are physically and metaphorically beginning and ending, and questioning what is static and what is kinetic. Site-specificity has become a vital factor in my body of work, to let the art react and grow within a space in which it was created, to capitalize on a moment before it is gone forever. I find myself repeatedly drawn to specific materials to express these concepts such as feathers, glass, dust, and salt for their vulnerability and ephemerality, and resins, styrofoam, plastics, lacquers and enamel paints for their artificiality, permanence and unnerving beauty.
I find the poeticism and concepts of the physics of our universe simultaneously fascinating, beautiful and horrifying. The pieces that I create contrast abstracted human intuition with the reality of our natural environment. I strive to emphasize the areas that exist in-between the boundaries of defined regions. My work, in many ways, is my own personal attempt to understand my place in the physical universe.
My first truly visceral artistic experiences as a child were not in the halls of some great art museum but amongst the displays and dioramas of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. It is these narratives and explorations of science that began to shape and contextualize my understanding of the physical world around me. It is through the studies of biology, astronomy, physics and geology that I use as the starting point for all of my artwork.
Formally, my work explores the tension created by the presence of fragility and the temporary. As an installation sculptor I am interested in where things are physically and metaphorically beginning and ending, and questioning what is static and what is kinetic. Site-specificity has become a vital factor in my body of work, to let the art react and grow within a space in which it was created, to capitalize on a moment before it is gone forever. I find myself repeatedly drawn to specific materials to express these concepts such as feathers, glass, dust, and salt for their vulnerability and ephemerality, and resins, styrofoam, plastics, lacquers and enamel paints for their artificiality, permanence and unnerving beauty.
I find the poeticism and concepts of the physics of our universe simultaneously fascinating, beautiful and horrifying. The pieces that I create contrast abstracted human intuition with the reality of our natural environment. I strive to emphasize the areas that exist in-between the boundaries of defined regions. My work, in many ways, is my own personal attempt to understand my place in the physical universe.
You have not yet created a curated collection!