About Jonathan
Baltimore City
Jonathan Thomas is the Chair of the Printmaking Department at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. Previously, he taught at the University of Miami in Miami, FL and Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. Jonathan received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a BS in Biology from Wake Forest University. He has shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Trudi Gallery in Los Angeles, the Bas Fisher Invitational… more
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Ten Minutes On A Foggy Night / Group 4
Ten Minutes On a Foggy Night / Group 1
The project Ten Minutes On a Foggy Night began shortly after I arrived in Baltimore from Miami, FL, where I had lived the previous seven years, and I consider it my first response to my new city. It took over a year to complete but its foundation was laid in a single morning through a visit to the venerable Baltimore institution, The Book Thing. I am a collector of printed matter, and I suppose by default, a book collector, and The Book Thing’s simple but profound mission to put unwanted books “into the hands of those that want them” perfectly suited my archeological spirit.[1] It became a discovery space that eased my geographic transition by connecting me, albeit indirectly, to the people of Baltimore through shared objects and the words/images held within.
I don’t use the term “archeological” for effect, quite literally my process for engaging with The Book Thing required surveying, excavation and analysis, all for the purpose of learning about the past to inform the present. I was interested in the range of unusual material culled from the bookshelves but also in the extreme limitation imposed by navigating such a specific space for a specific time. As a result, the material I collected had the quality of being both deeply personal and ubiquitous, both distinct and random, both modern and antiquated. Ultimately it inspired me to create a new series of images, imbued with the same binary sensibilities. The system for image creation, largely intuitive, involved the translation, association, re-contextualization and deconstruction of both the form and content of the source material. The process resulted in 66 discreet images created with water-based inks using pochoir and screenprint techniques on paper. The images can be read individually but their full potential is claimed only through their consideration in relation to one another.
The project’s title, Ten Minutes on a Foggy Night, takes it’s name from an early passage in H.G. Wells’s Victorian science fiction classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in which the character Montgomery, in conversation with the novel’s protagonist, Prendick, nearly reveals the reasons by which he became outcast from civilization, living a life he does not wish to live. The elusive specifics however, lost in a fog, are never subsequently revealed, framed only by the harsh vagueness of chance. It’s a meaningful omission that ultimately enriches the novel’s pervasive despair. The phrase is a time (ten minutes) space (fog) construct, symbolic of the elusive reasons, or rationale, by which meaningful things occur, and furthermore the difficulty of self-determination. The phrase is a symbol of not only the chance operations at play in the creation of this artwork, but much like in the book, the power of excision as a tactic to engage the reader/viewer.
[1] http://www.bookthing.org
I don’t use the term “archeological” for effect, quite literally my process for engaging with The Book Thing required surveying, excavation and analysis, all for the purpose of learning about the past to inform the present. I was interested in the range of unusual material culled from the bookshelves but also in the extreme limitation imposed by navigating such a specific space for a specific time. As a result, the material I collected had the quality of being both deeply personal and ubiquitous, both distinct and random, both modern and antiquated. Ultimately it inspired me to create a new series of images, imbued with the same binary sensibilities. The system for image creation, largely intuitive, involved the translation, association, re-contextualization and deconstruction of both the form and content of the source material. The process resulted in 66 discreet images created with water-based inks using pochoir and screenprint techniques on paper. The images can be read individually but their full potential is claimed only through their consideration in relation to one another.
The project’s title, Ten Minutes on a Foggy Night, takes it’s name from an early passage in H.G. Wells’s Victorian science fiction classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in which the character Montgomery, in conversation with the novel’s protagonist, Prendick, nearly reveals the reasons by which he became outcast from civilization, living a life he does not wish to live. The elusive specifics however, lost in a fog, are never subsequently revealed, framed only by the harsh vagueness of chance. It’s a meaningful omission that ultimately enriches the novel’s pervasive despair. The phrase is a time (ten minutes) space (fog) construct, symbolic of the elusive reasons, or rationale, by which meaningful things occur, and furthermore the difficulty of self-determination. The phrase is a symbol of not only the chance operations at play in the creation of this artwork, but much like in the book, the power of excision as a tactic to engage the reader/viewer.
[1] http://www.bookthing.org
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