ARTIST STATEMENT
We are no longer autonomous. Our thoughts and movements are modified, if not controlled, by an increasingly sophisticated system that we make up. We are connected to ourselves and each other through technology. What are these forces, and how do we understand or even see them?
I strive to create objects that wrap themselves around your gut, grab your imagination, and move you to new thoughts.
We live in the constant now. Information about the past is a narrative that cannot be completely known. The future is imagined but uncertain. Our narrative will end at some point, exactly how, where, and why are unknown. What we will be after that point is subject to superstition and speculation.
Artwork attempts to subvert this movement of time. By placing their ideas into a durable object, the artist imagines they will attain a sort of immortality. This immortality seems impressive in human terms. What is the lifetime of a painting or sculpture? A human lifespan judged in decades may be translated into centuries.
Everything is, in fact, in motion. Temperature, minute chemical reactions, and quantum mechanics all make changes. The world is moving around our ideas. What the world thinks of the nude or the bowl of fruit changes with each passing regime.
The museum is a further attempt at attaining stasis. Controlling the environment, controlling the thoughts that are allowed within the hallowed white walls, prolongs the lifespan of art and the ideas contained within the marble, paint, and plaster.
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the carefully constructed buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality and life for an expanded lifespan and value.
The artwork presented here is envisioned as an answer to this dilemma... to be in motion, to live and die in the museum... to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos, to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe.
Generalmotion@gmail.com
917-309-3053
712a Peralta St. Oakland CA 94607
ART CV
Jonathan Schipper is a sculptor that has combined many materials and techniques as far-ranging as pneumatics, leatherwork, robotics, and rock n roll. His work is often based on decay or destruction, work that becomes most alive just before it ends. He embraces the transitory nature of existence and rejects the sacred. He feels art should be an experience, not a possession. Many of his ideas are derived from media, but the work is physical, live, and irreproducible.
Jonathan holds a BFA and an MFA, but he feels his true early art education was at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2001). He now lives and works in Oakland CA. He has concentrated on large-scale engineered technology-based artworks that find their inspiration at the foundations of function and recognition. He has been shown worldwide in shows like the Guangzhou Triennial and "Under Destruction," Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, among many others.
Jonathan is best known for his Slow Motion Car Crash, where two full-sized cars are brought together over the course of months to simulate a head-on collision. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision is expanded into days or years. In this sculpture, the subject becomes the balance of creation and destruction, movement and time itself.
Jonathan's work is both very conceptual and very approachable. It deals with questions of perception, life, and destruction but is just as likely to entrance a five-year-old as the veteran art viewer.
Email: generalmotion@gmail.com
Phone: 917-309-3053
BORN 1973. Chico, California Lives and works in Oakland CA
EXHIBITIONS
2022 “Elektra : 6th International Digital Art Biennial (Bian) Metamorphosis -2022” Montreal CA
2021 “DUEL” RSOAA, Brooklyn
2020 "At Any Given Moment” PIEROGI New York
2019 “Campsite” Wassaic Project New York
“Detritus” Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada
2016 “Cubicle,” Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX
“Slow Motion Car Crash,” The Armory Show, Pier 92, New York, NY
“Rage for Art (Once Again),” Pierogi, New York, NY
2015 “Explosion” Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, Texas
2014 “State of the Art,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
2013 “Detritus,” The Boiler, Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
“The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA
“Homeward Found,” The Wassaic Project, NY
2012 “Slow motion car crash” Locus+, 16 Saville Row, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
"Guangzhou Triennial 2012: The Unseen. Theme and artists," Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China. Curated by Jiang Jiehong and Jonathan Watkins
"Nostalgia Machines," David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI
2011 “The Art of Deceleration,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (Group Exhibition curated by Chris Sharp and Gianni Jetzer)
“Slow Room,” Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany (One-person)
“Under Destruction,” travel to Swiss Institute, NY, NY (March 15–May 28, 2011)
“Autobody,” Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX
“Subjective / Objective,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (Group Exhibition)
2010 “Under Destruction,” Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (Group Exhibition curated by Chris Sharp and Gianni Jetzer)
“CyberArts 2010,” Festival Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
“Poesie der Bewegung,” Automobil Forum, Unter der Linden, Berlin, Germany
“Meta.Morf 2001: New.Brave.World Biennial for Art and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
“No Customs,” Abu Dhabi, UAE
2009 “Irreversibility,” The Boiler (Pierogi), Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
“Chelsea Visits Havana,” Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba (February 28–May 17
“Confict: Today’s Art,” The Hague, The Netherlands
“Heavy Metal,” Ramapo College, New Jersey
“Firebird,” Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
2008 “Pieces of the Whole,” Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (Sept. 28, 2008–Jan. 25, 2009)
“The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” Stuks Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium
“Apocalyptic Summer,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (Group Exhibition)
2007 “Firebird,” PIEROGI Brooklyn, New York (One-person)
ARTEFACT, Stuks Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium
2006 “Factitious,” PIEROGI Brooklyn, New York (June–July) and Leipzig (Nov-Dec)
2005 Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
2005 Momenta, Brooklyn, NY (Performance, Invisible Jet)
2003 “Cirque de Medecine,” Paperveins Museum of Art, New York NY
2001 “Invisible Jet,” GAVS, Brooklyn, NY
2000 “Parts,” Goliath, Brooklyn, NY
EDUCATION
2001 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
1996-98 MFA. Sculpture, Rinehart School of Sculpture, Baltimore, MD
1992-96 BFA. Sculpture, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA