Nina Johnson is pleased to announce Together Apart, a solo exhibition of new and existing paintings, artist books, and staple collages by Detroit-based artist Jonathan Rajewski. Opening May 23rd in the Front Gallery, the exhibition explores the porous boundaries of the visual, the verbal, and the material through an aesthetics of assemblage. In Together Apart, the autonomy of each canvas is challenged by unexpected diptychs; found images and ephemera are painted over and through; and the artist’s book is reconceived as an interactive, unbounded practice.
Rajewski was born in Bismarck, North Dakota and raised in Midland, Michigan, a small company town known for manufacturing Agent Orange, Napalm B, and bleach. In Together Apart, his work can be read as a dialogue with that industrial and militarized history, composed of paintings, collages, and transmedial objects that eschew craft and constraint in pursuit of a playful, provisional, and improvisational seriality. His artistic practice arises from a life of perennial, quotidian curiosity, attending to social norms and conventional power dynamics by reshaping them into multiple, open-ended processes and possibilities.
At Nina Johnson, the exhibition features a variety of new works, co-establishing and interposing one another. Several paintings are displayed in unanticipated pairings discovered throughout the compositional process and interspersed with collages, stapled fragments wherein the staple is both method of assembly and mark. Together Apart also includes a collection of Rajewski’s Book Paintings, an ongoing series of bound works consisting of cut up paintings, travel drawings, and accumulated materials that include xeroxes, black pepper, nail polish, and sand. The Book Paintings are made with a variety of fabric ranging from canvas to theatrical costume, and their consistent size and shape make possible numerous interactive arrangements and aesthetic conjunctions, inviting the viewer into a tactile experience that (re)composes the work.
“I am trying to make something that I don’t really understand,” said Jonathan Rajewski. “I am interested in indeterminacy. Painting is a form of exploratory thinking and doing, like taking a walk. These works are constitutive of psychological space for me; as zig-zagging, fantasizing, dis/connecting, overwriting, confusing, and unknowable. Disparate things make up the world.”
Together Apart will be on view through July 13th.
