About

 Biography:

Jonathan McFadden is Professor of Print Media at the University of Kentucky. He holds an MFA in Printmaking from Edinburgh College of Art (2009) and a BFA in Printmaking and BA in French from Texas State University (2006), and has studied at the Université de Picardie in Amiens, France. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the National Gallery of Scotland, the Royal Scottish Academy, Zayed University, the National School of Art in Bucharest, Northwestern University, and Julio Valdez Project Space, with over 100 group exhibitions across national and international venues. A 2010–11 Jerome Fellow at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, McFadden has also held residencies at the Prairie Center for the Arts, Cove Park, 55 LTD, Anchor Graphics, Endless Editions, Edition Basel, and Atelier Presse Papier. He has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist fellowship at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland.

CV

Artist Statement:

We have arrived at a moment in which language no longer needs an origin to have force, and images no longer need a referent to feel real. The phrases that move through our networks; the affirmations, the slogans, the terms and conditions we accept without reading. We operate with tremendous affective power while remaining essentially groundless. So do the images: the tropical frond glimpsed in someone's feed, the cherub repurposed as irony, the classical fragment adrift in a visual culture that has no memory of where it came from. They feel shared. They feel true. Whether they refer to anything beyond themselves is a question the system is not designed to ask.

My practice begins in that condition and refuses to leave it comfortable.

The prints begin with collision. Baroque sculpture, botanical illustration, the residue of art history's most confident gestures toward beauty and permanence. These are subjected to the logic of the corrupted file: horizontal displacement, pixel fracture, the halftone mesh that makes clear that every image is already a translation, already a system of dots pretending to be continuous tone. The glitch is not applied as style. It is used as argument. When a cherub's face is interrupted by a band of data corruption, when a floral medallion floats against a ground of scan-line noise, what becomes visible is the fragility of the image's claim to meaning. The fact that coherence was always contingent, always one bad signal away from dissolving into pattern.

The installations extend this logic into space. Language accumulates across walls until it loses coherence and becomes texture. Images of palm leaves, domestic plants, botanical forms lifted from the ambient visual language of the internet; pool on floors, cascade from surfaces, repeat until they become weather rather than picture. Neither the text nor the image is stable. Each destabilizes the other. The word that seemed to mean something becomes ornament; the plant that seemed decorative becomes evidence.

The natural forms that run through both bodies of work are not relief from this condition — they are implicated in it. The botanical illustration carries the colonial history of classification and extraction. The houseplant has become a prop in the performance of a life worth watching. The palm frond signals leisure, warmth, an aspirational geography that exists more completely on screens than it does in any particular place. Landscape here is always already mediated; not nature observed but nature consumed, filtered, corrupted, and recirculated until the original light it grew in is impossible to recover.

The materials insist on their own history even as they participate in its undoing. Photogravure holds the memory of the hand and the plate, of images made slowly from a world that had edges. Risograph carries the grain of democratic reproduction. Screenprint, with its mesh and its layers of translucent ink, makes visible the mechanical conditions of its own making. These processes are chosen not for nostalgia but because they make legible what digital reproduction conceals: that every image is a series of decisions, a physical act, a thing produced under specific conditions that leave marks.

What I am ultimately interested in is the gap between the speed at which we receive images and the speed at which we are able to actually think about them. Neither the word nor the picture moves slowly enough to be held. The glitch, the accumulation, the repetition past the point of reading. These are not failures. They are the places where the image tells the truth about itself. My work builds inside that gap, not to close it, but to make it large enough to stand in and look around.

The new print is now woven throughout as a parallel and complementary argument to the installations. The glitch as the print equivalent of what accumulation does spatially.