Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more. Meeting #100 specifies a meeting at “The Clock Tower, Leicester, England, May 7th 2024, Noon”. While the work indicates a very specific appointment in the future, the reason or goal of the meeting is intentionally unclear. This basic principle and structure always remains the same throughout the series. The invitation to meet is potentially open to an audience of thousands, which is theoretically more likely to result in a rally or demonstration rather than a brief encounter. The reception of the work changes at the very moment of the meeting, when anticipation gives way to memory and nostalgia.
Jonathan Monk re-fashions and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art through witty, ingenious, and irreverent means. Through wall paintings, monochromes, ephemeral sculpture, and photography, Monk reflects on the tendency of contemporary art to canabilize references, while paying homage to figures such as Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner. Monk’s art practice does not follow any specific style; it doesn’t contain any common characteristic to identify his work at first glance. The amount and variety of his works poses questions about what supports them. Demystifying the creative process, Monk often employs appropriation, humor, irony, and anecdote in his work. To enter an exhibition of works by Jonathan Monk is like taking part in a treasure hunt, made up of digressions and space-time manipulations.
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
The film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Beyond the White Walls , with a commentary written and spoken by Jeremy Deller, is often wryly amusing...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...