<<< PREVIOUS PROJECT
/ NEXT PROJECT >>>
Interview between Giulia Tornasello & Jonathan VanDyke
for 1/9unosunove & Untitled Association
on the occasion of the exhibition One wall a web through which the moment walks
2024
JVD: For all of us – and I am speaking to myself as much as to everyone else – if we can train ourselves to put our devices aside as much as possible, and take the time to pause and sense and see and feel what is around us, we'll begin to notice that the world will open up to us, that there is so much we are losing the ability to see, sense, feel, and hold: so much of what we need to know is already here, lingering as subtext, a web just under the surface.
What Queer Corner
Am I In?
with Francisco-Fernando
Granados
A Correspondence for
Who Claims Abstraction (With a Difference)?
Published by Simon Fraser
University / SFU Galleries
Canada
2024
"We first dialogued without words. In 2011 you performed in Obstructed View, a series of three-hour, silent works I presented at The Power Plant in Toronto. You interpreted my score — sometimes nude, and marked with colour — embodying notions about painting, gay sex, kinship, viral transmission, and the way queer bodies are marked in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Neither of us are particularly reticent about signaling our politics or revealing our identifications, but these disclosures tend to be subtext in the artworks we make, rather than appearing directly or literally on the surface. . ."
Hold, Still
by Jonathan VanDyke
Essay for Shifter 25: Waiting
Ed. by Sreshta Rit Premnath
& Avram Alpert
"How can we create a different model for holding still, one that enacts warmth, reserve, attentiveness, maintenance, thoughtfulness, and receptivity? And one that counters the quick reactions build into social media platforms, and gives preference to positions of sustained listening, checking in, and making sense, while also noting where sense cannot be made. I value action and movement, I'm not arguing that we preference mind over body, or prize academic theorizing over practice. Rather, let's regard pauses as intrinsic to processes..."
Portfolio & Text for Drain Magazine
by Jonathan VanDyke
Queerfacture
Ed. by Dr. Gregory Minnisale
& Avantika Bawa
November 2021
"We assume that living openly queerly has become easier, especially for young people. This oversimplification diminishes the difficulties faced globally by many, if not most, who want to love and express their gender outside of convention. For me, coming out was a matter of palpable risk and sizable loss, and for years I performed as straight. While passing you learn to study and assess what you're up against. Living queerly is a long slow process of losing the grasp of forces that are controlling you, of walking off the lines you're not able to follow. You encounter the tracks of others who have wandered off those lines. Queerness, of course, might be just one of many reasons a person has been pushed aside. Our veering "slantwise" (in the words of scholar Sara Ahmed) might engender solidarity with others who diverge, slant, wiggle, fall, and lose course...."
Say Her Name: Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells
Op-Ed
By Jonathan VanDyke
The York Daily Record (PA)
August 2020
"It would be difficult to overstate the degree of daily prejudice queer people have faced in the US. The Stonewall Riots in New York City, a 1969 uprising protesting constant police mistreatment and brutality against the LGBTQ community, were initiated by trans women of color. Even within the movement itself, trans people were subject to prejudice and exclusion. But their willingness to speak truth to power, and decades of grueling work by advocates for equal treatment under the law, made it possible for me to write this today without fear of putting my life at risk. But our transgender kin cannot say the same..."
Letter to a Viewer,
July-August 2022
for LA Art Week 2022
written for the exhibition
How to Operate in a Green Room
Luis de Jesus Gallery
I’m four stories up, tending to the makeshift rooftop garden I began planting during the pandemic. This little roof in Brooklyn – a sort of urban plateau in which I am totally exposed – is also the place where I feel most blissfully out of sight. The city-grizzled branches of an old tree touch the eastern edge of our roofline. I've lived here more than a decade and I struggle to remember the tree's variety. I am grateful for this tree that shades our bedroom from the full blast of July heat, but it remains unnamed.
For now this plot of roof offers a breeze and a patch of greens. My first effort, in the pandemic summer of 2020, was edible plants. A seed from a flowering herb must have blown from our roof to our sidewalk, so by that fall a mature basil plant sprouted from a crack in the cement next to our garbage bins.
Jonathan VanDyke Interviewed by Daisy Nam
The Rib
November 2018
"DN: The performance sounds like a ritualistic process, which the audience, including the volunteers, could access and experience.
JVD: I once visited the Duomo in Milan during a religious holiday, and they had a series of paintings that were hung high in the air, temporarily, almost like flags or banners. I love this idea of a painting as an event in time, removed from the wall. I’ve also seen Khmer statuary exhibited in museums in the West as priceless objects on pedestals, but in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, these objects are still actively worshipped and given offerings. I was so affected by seeing that.
Quilts live in a hybrid spaces of the sacred and profane. In some cultures, like the Amish, you could describe the patient work of the quilter as a ritual or a form of veneration. In The Patient Eye, I’m ritualizing pedestrian actions–standing, observing, contemplating, being silent. I want to stretch these actions into almost impossibly long, extended gestures. Have you seen the photos of the Hindu Sadhus who hold one arm in the air for years on end? Persistence transforms the commonplace into the sacred...."
Letter to a Viewer,
June 2022
For Chelsea Music Festival, NYC
One of my first summer jobs, as a college intern, was spent in the storage facility of a Pennsylvania museum, where I re-organized the state's collection of works on paper. While working alone in a windowless vault, the realization that I was gay was just starting to take shape. Certain qualities were indescribable: my queerness was still queer to me. From the outside, I seemed the same, but my interior world was churning. There's a particularly American pressure to state one's identity. I'm interested in those things for which we can't find words. When I lay out pieces of a painting, some colors and marks float visually to the surface, while others sink back. Patterns emerge among disparate parts. I might enjoy the dynamism of certain tensions and accentuate irresolution. This is a way to describe my studio process; it's also a way to describe how one makes a life.
Portfolio for
Vector Magazine
Issue 8
Guest edited by Ellie Krakow
June 2018
Letter to a Viewer,
September 2019
For 1/9unosunove Rome
The radio is on. I’m listening to the news: the planet is burning, the situation at the border is bleak, the US President is lying. I could tune it out, but I don’t want to. Did you think that I was only absorbed in the surfaces of these paintings? I want you to find respite in the particular beauty I’m trying to create. But there is a subtext, a politics to using these materials and processes. For over a decade I’ve gathered an image archive ––evocative photos from the news and from art history––and I’ve printed some of these on the backs of the paintings. I imagine these images portray the subconscious of the paintings: what they would see in their dreams as they slept.