Jonathan Allen "Explore Thyself"
Lu Magnus
This event has ended.
Explore Thyself is an exhibition of new mixed-media works by Jonathan Allen. Engaging the contemporary cultural landscape, Allen’s latest body of work merges drawing, painting, and collage techniques. Explore Thyself, a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s book on the journey of spiritual discovery, Walden, suggests the expansive and open approach to media and imagery that Allen's work engenders, inviting viewers into dialogue with materials familiar to them: subway maps, sales circulars, dollar bills, advertisements, magazines and other popular periodicals. With his paintings, Allen puts a mirror up to his viewers and challenges them to pause and see the works not only as a reflection of their daily realities but also how one would transcend the quotidian urban life, spurring the viewers to question what they may still become.
Culling from art history, pop culture and current events, Allen reassembles images into surreal dreamscapes. These dreamscapes are often fragmented, abstracted and enigmatic, opening a critical window on today’s political and environmental condition. Entwining these materials with painting and drawing, Allen imagistically evokes the absurdity of contemporary life and the challenges of retaining humanity amidst the alienating effects of our heavily mediated modernity. The tactility and layers of Allen’s paintings reflect the complexity and the existential dilemma of the human condition. Alternately poetic and political, celebratory and critical, uplifting and dark, these works are deeply reflective of a new cultural conversation about pop culture, technology, media and what it means to be part of a larger social fabric.
Allen’s visual deluge is a result of weaving the immediacy of images from various contemporary media with classical formal arrangements of monumental form and content. Architecture, the ultimate symbol of Man’s presence, structures social spaces; framing isolated figures and deconstructing pop imagery, Allen deals with the issue of location, space and culture, which is forged of everyday discouragement and discontent, mitigated by either a stoic determination or an inexorable sense of optimism. In light of this collision between a romantic ideal and the often harsh reality of contemporary life, particularly in the aftermath of recent natural and man-made disasters, Allen begs the transcendental question of the legacy of the 21st century.
Media
Schedule
from November 04, 2011 to December 18, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-11-04 from 18:00 to 21:00