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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. I draw things in my everyday life, which imbues my work with echoes of home, memory, nostalgia, and routine. No matter the subject, my drawing practice embraces the essential properties of 2-dimensional space -- how its meaning and presence is shifted by the simplest addition and subtraction of material. My current Nausea series is heavily influenced by the way our media diets exercise a muscle of rapid consumption of images. This exercise results in quickly ascribed meanings and the consequential dismissal of nuance and alternative narrative. Underpinned by themes of absurdism, phenomenology, and existentialism, my uncanny representations use sparse visual cues to slow this rate of consumption. Figures and their afterimages are rendered to the same dimension. Easily categorized elements like darkness are given expansive bodies of marks and blemishes, often disrupting the lines between figure and ground in the same square inch of space. This series gives viewers the problem of negotiating an ambiguous image to highlight 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 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 15th International Drawing Annual. He earned his BFA from Winthrop University and his MFA from Clemson University and is a drawing instructor for Clemson University. Jonathan currently works out of Oyé Studios, an artists' cooperative in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. | |||