NEW YORK, NY.- Lu Magnus presents LOADING, a solo exhibition by Jonathan Allen, featuring new paintings, works on paper, and animations. Developed in collaboration with contemporary poet Anselm Berrigan, this new body of work reflects on social, cultural and mundane phenomena arising from our digital era. Berrigan has written 12 new poems that also engage the theme of LOADING, reproduced along with Allen’s artwork in a new book available from Brooklyn Arts Press.
LOADING refers to the ubiquitous message received after clicking on a digital icon and waiting to see what materializes. Repeated and predictable experiences with technology have led us to trust the intangible, digital image and in turn reshaped our expectations surrounding the exchange of ideas.
With each new invention, from the printing press to Google Glass, our expectations for communication swell. Allen incorporates traces of information exchange into his works with written words and coding found in print materials and the interweaving of spoken poetry into his animation. His architecturally inspired images, themselves built in layers, also call to mind the human compulsion to control our surroundings. We amass so much data that we build physical structures to house information—seen in the library of Loading and the server stacks of Pre-listserv. Inherently intangible numbers and letters now shape physical space; works such as Watching and You & your Signals & codes reveal that, in addition to our homes and offices, we now exist in equally real spaces assembled from pixels and code.
Born in 1975, Jonathan Allen holds a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University. LOADING is his second solo exhibition with Lu Magnus. Allen has exhibited at numerous galleries and non-profit spaces in New York, including Lu Magnus, PS122, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artists Space, and BRIC Rotunda Gallery. He participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace & Swingspace residency programs and has been awarded residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, Cill Rialaig in Ireland, and Blue Mountain Center. A recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, and George Sugarman Foundations, his recent solo shows include exhibitions with Lu Magnus in New York, Real Arte in Italy, GoNorth in Beacon, and Buffalo Art Studio in Buffalo.
