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S T A T E M E N T
My drawing practice consists of observational drawing, life sketching, and contending with the blurry lines between things. I recontextualize my observations by altering space, form, and their sense of time. By drawing things within my everyday life, my destabilized images evoke wide ranges of meanings triggered by forces like home, memory, nostalgia, and routine. My current work is heavily influenced by our era of image saturation and how we exercise our muscles of rapid consumption. Underpinned by themes of absurdism, phenomenology, and existentialism, my uncanny representations use sparse visual cues to slow the rate of their consumption. Figures and their afterimages are rendered to the same dimension; easily categorized elements like darkness are given expansive bodies of crosshatch marks and blemishes; the lines between figure and ground are refined and obliterated in the same square inches of space. As viewers negotiate the problem of an ambiguous image, the haze of graphite marks highlights the susceptibility of visual perception. |
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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 Festival of Flowers Juried Shows, and Artisphere's 2022 and 2024 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. |