I finally find the time to work on the material for a new essayistic/personal documentary, which I gathered during last year’s residency in the US. The Film „A building at Gettysburg“ (working title) will evolve around questions of remembrance, ideology, (re)writing of history, more specifically the histories of the American civil war and the mythologies of the Lost Cause, monuments gone, my families (military) history, the Black brigades of Cincinnati and most certainly the emancipatory potential of counter histories and story telling.
So much looking forward to this one, keep your eyes peeled.
Thank you for making this possible Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen and Liebelt-Stiftung Hamburg.
Edition
Solid Benders. Fragment (Boeing 747) Wax, Steel nail, Leipzig, 2024 Edition of 5 + 2 AP similar but unique specimen comes in a cardboard box
For this years exhibition PAN AM at Gallery Oscar eV at Weltecho Chemnitz I made an edition of wax objects, that are an extraction of/refer to the sculpture group solid benders (2021). One of the wings of a Boeing 747-7 (scale 1:144) is hung over a steel nail, cuddles and tucks around it, as it almost drips away. Ask for price.
Pan Am
11 February–7 March 2023, Saturday, 10 February 2024 GALERIE OSCAR e.V. Annaberger Straße 24 09111 Chemnitz
In the exhibition PAN AM, Jonathan McNaughton embarks on a search for a historical core within the scattered remnants of his own and our collective past. Using essay film, installation, object, sculpture, drawing and video, McNaughton undertakes an archaeological search for traces of the autobiographical and the remembered. American barracks in the hills of central Franconia, fragments of popular culture, long-faded memories of a place beyond the waters of the Atlantic Ocean–a place that perhaps never existed–become material for the artist to examine the relationship between the remembered and the reality actually found today, between claim and reality.
Warum Schreibst du den Hasen nicht mit H
Jonathan Mc Naughton and Marc Lotzmann 10. March–28 April 2023, Galerie Suzie Shride Girardigasse 10/8 1060 Vienna
'The dream of flying is almost as old as the history of mankind, and that history only began with the detachment from nature, with making it available, and finally, since the Enlightenment at the latest, with its cartography. Because everything had to be subordinated to a purpose, our concepts had cut off from things what actually belonged to them, the relationship between man and nature had become skewed, a cuddly relationship had been lost.' Jonathan Mc Naughton.
Suzie Shride shows the group show by Jonathan Mc Naughton and Marc Lotzmann 'Warum schreibst du den Hasen nicht mit H'.
In the teenage years of the 90s, the promises were still big. The first MTV videos came out. Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden showed an aesthetic of distorted, acidic fields full of poppies and other plants–the colors were bright and nuclear. The cold war was over. The taming of nature, not seeing oneself as part of it, but rather as an antithesis, is not only demonstrated in the concept of fenced-in allotments, where everyone cultivates their own individual hell, but in the all-encompassing climate catastrophe. A few years ago, when the Anthropocene was presented in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, it was still about observation, the age of man's footprints on the planet, the awareness of one's own imprint. In her 2007 book 'Meeting the Universe Halfway', the quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad speaks of entangled existence and includes the observer, who during Newton was still outside an experiment to be measured, in the scenery and thus in the co-production of situation and event.
The little men are small, walking as salt and pepper shakers in a rigid step around the stagnant stream of water from the allotment watering cans. The airplanes have run out of steam and lay down in the landscape as solid benders and are now retired. Pepe the Frog now lives in limbo, trapped in the loop with his favorite Marianne Rosenberg song : 'Er gehört zu mir... wie mein Name an der Tür...'
Jonathan McNaughton
is a sculpture and moving image artist based in Leipzig, Germany ... He considers his practice to be an uncovering of layers, a drilling for the historic sediment of present-day society–with all its excesses and phenomena–be it fragments of popular culture, the legacy of the consumer and object world, the history of the Enlightenment or the conditions of modern working environments. By means of an archaeological search for traces in the sediments of our past and present, in the embodied, remembered and dreamed, we become aware of structures, conditions and forms of ideology. Using research-based, filmic and essayistic work, multimedia installations or interventions in existing structures and a playful approach to material, sculptural form and expectation, the aim of his artistic work is to create fissures and fractures through which the possibilities of a different future are to emerge. He studied in Alba d'Urbano's class for Intermedia Art at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Portfolio and CV on request. Read less
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Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023Alexander Gardner's iconographic images depicting the battlefields of the American Civil War are considered to be among the first photographic testimonies of the horrors of war that were accessible to a wide audience. Years later, historians discovered inconsistencies in Gardner's photographs of the scenes around Gettysburg: A corpse appeared in several pictures in different places, and the rifle also seemed to be the same one over and over again. Today, it is believed that Gardner carried probs in his carriage, which he used to decorate his scenes.
The work "Alexander Gardner revisited - Gettysburg 2023" focuses on the constructed nature of images through the re-embodiment of one of the pictures at the original location. The search for the right frame becomes a parable of the ideological substance inherent in images.
i think I was blind before I saw youThe installation "I think I was blind before I saw you" is based on the memory of a place from my childhood–the house of my grandparents in West Virginia, built entirely of wood. Blurred but warm at the same time its stored away in my memory. An attempt of a replica, in fragment, part of the porch of that house in the woods near Sheppartstown, WV.
By re-evaluating childhood experience, the very relationship between a feeling of promise (long gone) and today’s reality are re-examined. The Cardinal, whose bright red color only occurs in the northern climes of the Americas, looks out into an indefinite future.
Wooden slats, found object (porcelain), Chemnitz, 2024
don't step on the jelly fish"I remember the softness of the gray carpet on the stairs leading up to our bedroom, the elephant in the corner, made of colorful glazed porcelain, the one you supposedly brought back from Vietnam.
I remember the basement below the house entirely made of wood, filled with our boogey boards, wobbly beach chairs, tools and your golf clubs. How we intentionally built waves into the carpet to play mini golf.
I remember the waves that seemed like sky-high, shimmering towers. We used to come here every other year. On the pear people spoke to me in a language I didn't fully understand. I didn't care. I looked at the flounders, blue fish and snappers in their buckets. There was a vending machine at the beginning of that pier that dispensed soda cans in all kinds of colors. Maybe it's still there today.“
Solid BendersMankind’s desire to fly is almost as old as our history itself. This history begins with the detachment of the subject from nature, with the assimilation of nature, and culminates in the surveying and mapping of our world during the era of Enlightenment. The desire to classify, to give a name to everything, to categorize, and finally make everything available to the needs of human mankind, has ultimately distorted our belonging to and embeddedness into that which surrounds us. The ‚solid benders‘, however, lay down like cuddly beings where they should actually take off, become lazy, and thus explore a new relationship between man, nature and technology.
Apachen über AnsbachThe cinematic essay ‚Apachen über Ansbach‘ deals with a specific aspect of (German-)US-American history, the American barracks on German soil - a search for traces along the autobiographical and the remembered.
Katterbach near Ansbach in Bavaria. Behind sandbags and all that barbed wire lies a place where American soldiers and their families are supposed to feel a sense of home. Burger King, pickup trucks, Movie Theater. Elements of American interior design and architecture scarcely cover up structures built by the German Nazi Party–like a shell, hastily erected utilitarian architecture is placed over existing structures. „Little America“ right in the heart of Germany. For most soldiers, this is just a stopover on their way to Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan or Iraq. A place of transit, a quasi-simulation of the country they had just left behind to fight wars far from home.
I have known these barracks since I was a child, as they were both my father‘s place of arrival in Germany and his place of work. But where does the appeal these places have on me originate from? With a camera cautiously inching its way forward, I set out in search for answers, placing my voiceover over captured images, confronting memories and promises buried deep in my childhood, promises enraptured in things so different from my usual surrounding–brighter, more exciting. A juxtaposition of a memory gone by with the reality found in these places today. A drilling for the historical sediment of these places, an uncovering of layers, an archaeology in the sediments of my and our collective past.
please ask for link to film, will gladly share <3
Essayistic film, 33min, Leipzig, 2021
linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpiecesThe body of works deals with the conditions of labor and environments in which they take place. The ‚drilldrawings‘ form the heart of the installation. Eight drawings created during an 8-hour work shift, which I carried out using my battery-powered percussion drill MAKITA DHP 453. A yellow highlighter inserted into the machine’s drill feed, I’m driving a rotating felt-tip pen over bright white paper until it is exhausted. Video, text and photographs are clustered around these drawings, the display oscillates between architecture, sculpture, and ‚prob‘. Concrete gray, corrugated sheet metal, the moment of repetition, and images of empty break rooms become placeholders for experiences of flexibilization, isolation, and the vanishing of solidarity within a highly fragmented work force.
this was built for you and me, and you and meA two-room apartment within a prefabricated building complex in Chemnitz is shrunk to a scale of 0.82:1 by means of wooden constructions placed into the original architecture. The reduction in size corresponds to the ratio of my above-average height to an so-called average standard body size, which I discover in a DIN standard for living spaces. The emerging architecture reveals its artificial and backdrop-like character, creates spaces in between and thus allows us to take a reflection on possibilities of transformation. Questions concerning the nature of environments created by us humans, questions regarding the relationship between (forced) collectivization and the individual are raised by means of an immediate, bodily experience.
These Pretzels Are Making Me ThirstyWithin shopping malls retail architecture covers up primary and structural architecture–like a second skin. By means of the exact copy, the facsimile, and finally the slightly alteration of two modular shelves of a former confectionery store, the artificiality of this spatial situation is focused, and thereby allows for a secondary reflection. I intentionally leave the copies mdf-colored, dull and hollow–like a coulisse. Environements and conditions of space invented by marketing specialists, that supposedly create desires within us, thus show themselves their dull and bleak trick-like character.
site-specific installation, construction wood, MDF, screw clamps, Berlin, 2022
Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023Alexander Gardner's iconographic images depicting the battlefields of the American Civil War are considered to be among the first photographic testimonies of the horrors of war that were accessible to a wide audience. Years later, historians discovered inconsistencies in Gardner's photographs of the scenes around Gettysburg: A corpse appeared in several pictures in different places, and the rifle also seemed to be the same one over and over again. Today, it is believed that Gardner carried probs in his carriage, which he used to decorate his scenes.
The work "Alexander Gardner revisited - Gettysburg 2023" focuses on the constructed nature of images through the re-embodiment of one of the pictures at the original location. The search for the right frame becomes a parable of the ideological substance inherent in images.
i think I was blind before I saw youThe installation "I think I was blind before I saw you" is based on the memory of a place from my childhood–the house of my grandparents in West Virginia, built entirely of wood. Blurred but warm at the same time its stored away in my memory. An attempt of a replica, in fragment, part of the porch of that house in the woods near Sheppartstown, WV.
By re-evaluating childhood experience, the very relationship between a feeling of promise (long gone) and today’s reality are re-examined. The Cardinal, whose bright red color only occurs in the northern climes of the Americas, looks out into an indefinite future.
Wooden slats, found object (porcelain), Chemnitz, 2024
don't step on the jelly fish"I remember the softness of the gray carpet on the stairs leading up to our bedroom, the elephant in the corner, made of colorful glazed porcelain, the one you supposedly brought back from Vietnam.
I remember the basement below the house entirely made of wood, filled with our boogey boards, wobbly beach chairs, tools and your golf clubs. How we intentionally built waves into the carpet to play mini golf.
I remember the waves that seemed like sky-high, shimmering towers. We used to come here every other year. On the pear people spoke to me in a language I didn't fully understand. I didn't care. I looked at the flounders, blue fish and snappers in their buckets. There was a vending machine at the beginning of that pier that dispensed soda cans in all kinds of colors. Maybe it's still there today.“
Solid BendersMankind’s desire to fly is almost as old as our history itself. This history begins with the detachment of the subject from nature, with the assimilation of nature, and culminates in the surveying and mapping of our world during the era of Enlightenment. The desire to classify, to give a name to everything, to categorize, and finally make everything available to the needs of human mankind, has ultimately distorted our belonging to and embeddedness into that which surrounds us. The ‚solid benders‘, however, lay down like cuddly beings where they should actually take off, become lazy, and thus explore a new relationship between man, nature and technology.
Apachen über AnsbachThe cinematic essay ‚Apachen über Ansbach‘ deals with a specific aspect of (German-)US-American history, the American barracks on German soil - a search for traces along the autobiographical and the remembered.
Katterbach near Ansbach in Bavaria. Behind sandbags and all that barbed wire lies a place where American soldiers and their families are supposed to feel a sense of home. Burger King, pickup trucks, Movie Theater. Elements of American interior design and architecture scarcely cover up structures built by the German Nazi Party–like a shell, hastily erected utilitarian architecture is placed over existing structures. „Little America“ right in the heart of Germany. For most soldiers, this is just a stopover on their way to Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan or Iraq. A place of transit, a quasi-simulation of the country they had just left behind to fight wars far from home.
I have known these barracks since I was a child, as they were both my father‘s place of arrival in Germany and his place of work. But where does the appeal these places have on me originate from? With a camera cautiously inching its way forward, I set out in search for answers, placing my voiceover over captured images, confronting memories and promises buried deep in my childhood, promises enraptured in things so different from my usual surrounding–brighter, more exciting. A juxtaposition of a memory gone by with the reality found in these places today. A drilling for the historical sediment of these places, an uncovering of layers, an archaeology in the sediments of my and our collective past.
please ask for link to film, will gladly share <3
Essayistic film, 33min, Leipzig, 2021
linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpiecesThe body of works deals with the conditions of labor and environments in which they take place. The ‚drilldrawings‘ form the heart of the installation. Eight drawings created during an 8-hour work shift, which I carried out using my battery-powered percussion drill MAKITA DHP 453. A yellow highlighter inserted into the machine’s drill feed, I’m driving a rotating felt-tip pen over bright white paper until it is exhausted. Video, text and photographs are clustered around these drawings, the display oscillates between architecture, sculpture, and ‚prob‘. Concrete gray, corrugated sheet metal, the moment of repetition, and images of empty break rooms become placeholders for experiences of flexibilization, isolation, and the vanishing of solidarity within a highly fragmented work force.
this was built for you and me, and you and meA two-room apartment within a prefabricated building complex in Chemnitz is shrunk to a scale of 0.82:1 by means of wooden constructions placed into the original architecture. The reduction in size corresponds to the ratio of my above-average height to an so-called average standard body size, which I discover in a DIN standard for living spaces. The emerging architecture reveals its artificial and backdrop-like character, creates spaces in between and thus allows us to take a reflection on possibilities of transformation. Questions concerning the nature of environments created by us humans, questions regarding the relationship between (forced) collectivization and the individual are raised by means of an immediate, bodily experience.
These Pretzels Are Making Me ThirstyWithin shopping malls retail architecture covers up primary and structural architecture–like a second skin. By means of the exact copy, the facsimile, and finally the slightly alteration of two modular shelves of a former confectionery store, the artificiality of this spatial situation is focused, and thereby allows for a secondary reflection. I intentionally leave the copies mdf-colored, dull and hollow–like a coulisse. Environements and conditions of space invented by marketing specialists, that supposedly create desires within us, thus show themselves their dull and bleak trick-like character.
site-specific installation, construction wood, MDF, screw clamps, Berlin, 2022
Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
filmstill Alexander Gardner revisited – Gettysburg 2023,
original daguerrotyope from A. Gardner’s „A sharpshooter’s last sleep“ from the archives of the Library of Congress i think I was blind before I saw you,
installation view, Galerie Oscar eV im Weltecho, Chemnitz, 2024 i think I was blind before I saw you,
installation view, Galerie Oscar eV im Weltecho, Chemnitz, 2024 i think I was blind before I saw you,
detail, Galerie Oscar eV im Weltecho, Chemnitz, 2024 don't step on the jelly fish,
installation view, 700 Bryden, Columbus, Ohio, 2023 don't step on the jelly fish,
installation view, 700 Bryden, Columbus, Ohio, 2023 Solid Benders,
installation view, Suzie Shirde, Vienna, 2023 Solid Benders,
installation view, Suzie Shirde, Vienna, 2023 Solid Benders,
installation view, Suzie Shirde, Vienna, 2023 Apachen über Ansbach,
Filmstill, bored Linedancers at the German-American Freundschaftsfest Apachen über Ansbach,
filmstill, A black hawk – until today the US Army still uses names of the indigenous nations of the northern Americas as term for the combat helicopters Apachen über Ansbach,
Filmstill, lunch break – strike Apachen über Ansbach,
Filmstill, that sweet puprle soda pop linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 linie 91 GVZ Nord, again and again – Die Schicht hat 8 Stunden–the masterpieces,
installation view, Birkenstr 30 projectspace, Leipzig, 2023 this was built for you and me, and you and me,
view from outside, Building complex Fritz-Heckert, Begehung Festival Chemnitz, 2020 this was built for you and me, and you and me,
installation view, Begehungen Festival Chemnitz, 2020 this was built for you and me, and you and me,
installation view, Begehungen Festival Chemnitz, 2020 this was built for you and me, and you and me,
engineering Drawing, Chemnitz, 2020 These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty,
Sidespecific installation, Stella, Berlin, 2022 These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty,
Sidespecific installation, Stella, Berlin, 2022 These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty,
Sidespecific installation, Stella, Berlin, 2022 These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty,
Sidespecific installation, Stella, Berlin, 2022 These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty,
Sidespecific installation, Stella, Berlin, 2022
