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S T A T E M E N T
I draw to contend with the blurry lines between things, particularly those with bottomless wells of narratives or meanings. I recontextualize my observations by altering space, form, and other phenomena. This results in destabilized images with wide ranges of meaning, triggered by forces like home, memory, nostalgia, and routine. I create drawings that loosely evoke these forces to highlight the susceptibility of visual perception. My current work is heavily influenced by our era of image saturation, and how we exercise muscles of rapid consumption and judgment. Underpinned by themes of absurdism, phenomenology, and existentialism, my work uses sparse visual cues to slow this rate of consumption through uncanny depictions of space and time. Figures and their afterimages are rendered into the same dimension; easily categorized elements like darkness are given literal bodies of crosshatched marks and strange blemishes; the lines between figure and ground are refined and obliterated in the same square inches of space: compounding shifts and departures from reality give viewers the problem of negotiating an ambiguous, indeterminable image through a haze of presumptions. |
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B I O
Jonathan Bolton has exhibited work in solo, juried, and curated exhibitions across South Carolina, including ArtField's 2023 Competition, The Arts Center of Greenwood's 2022 and 23 Festival of Flowers Juried Show, and Artisphere's 2022 Artist of the Upstate Juried Exhibition. His work work was recently exhibited in Manifest Gallery's DRAWN 2023 in Cincinnati, OH. His work is featured in regional and international publications including Manifest Gallery's upcoming 15th International Drawing Annual. He earned his BFA from Winthrop University and his MFA from Clemson University. Jonathan lives in Greenville, SC and is a drawing instructor for Clemson University. |