Jonathan Zawada
THIS LA-BASED AUSTRALIAN IS BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN ART, NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY.
WHEN ELTON JOHN BUYS ONE OF YOUR PAINTINGS during your first exhibition in Los Angeles, you must be doing something right. For Australian artist Jonathan Zawada, that 2010 purchase was a highlight, he says, that was “pretty hard to come back from”, but judging by the prodigious body of work he’s since become celebrated for — easily traversing the lines of design, contemporary art and product design — it was just the incentive he needed. The next year, Zawada and his wife, Annie, moved from Sydney to LA so he could focus on his art, which has evolved to cross a range of media, and delve into the collision of technology and nature. Zawada’s journey began in graphic design, working with major music and fashion labels. Over time, his creative drive flowed into his highly detailed and surreal drawings, oil landscapes, sculptures and installations. His most recent project, Goldfish, a collaboration with Shanghai-based digital artist Kim Laughton, encapsulates the technology-versus-nature divide. “Kim and I bonded over this particular piece of computing equipment,” he says. “We conceived a structure comprised of very expensive computers on scaffolding sitting in a pond of live goldfish, with TV screens and a mini desert above it. The installation was backed by a massive LED screen playing a video game I created that responded to changes in the room.” For Zawada, this corporate-funded Beijing project was not only great fun, it changed his creative approach. “Kim and I are very similar,” he explains. “He feels the art world can be very old-fashioned. If you do a performance or installation in a gallery, you don’t have to ››
‹‹ communicate with anyone; you don’t have to make it satisfying. We feel there is an opportunity to create amazing experiences if it weren’t for the strange language around art galleries that makes exhibitions alienating.” Zawada plans a follow-up ‘supercomputer’ installation in LA, and more non-commercial projects. It was with the encouragement of West Hollywood gallery Prism that Zawada and Annie moved to LA in 2011. Initially he was reticent, but has since found the city provides the mental and physical space to create. “LA is quite a lonely place, the way it’s set up and spread out,” he says. “It’s not an intense city like New York or Sydney. We are not part of a scene. So in that way it doesn’t influence me directly, but I do feel I have more room to make mistakes and try things out.” While the LA culture might not have had an impact on Zawada’s work, the environment has. “I didn’t realise until afterwards, but we took a long road trip before settling here and the dramatic landscapes we witnessed influenced my series Over Time.” Another influence was the moiré effect of the chain-link fencing that lines the city’s freeways. This in part inspired Zawada’s mesh series, including Real 3D, exhibited at Sydney’s Sarah Cottier Gallery in 2014, and A Particular Turbulent Wave, exhibited at Beers London in 2015. Finally, there’s Zawada’s product design, borne of necessity. “When we moved to LA, we didn’t have much furniture or money,” he recalls. “With a hacksaw I turned a shipping crate into a side table. After our son, Pip, was born and I came up for air, I realised it would be nice to make it out of marble, so I went to a yard and handpicked custom pieces. Only in America could you do this. In Australia, they would want minimum orders of 30!” And so the ‘Affordances #1 (Y.O.R.I)’ table was born. When lights were needed for the house, he designed his lamp series, ‘Affordances #2 (Ω.M.G Lean Into the Wind)’. “Australians are good at getting on and doing stuff, in a Paul Hogan kind of way,” Zawada says. “This can be good and bad, but in an initial sense it’s great, as you can accomplish a lot.”
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“LA is not an intense city like New York or Sydney... I feel I have more room to make mistakes and try things out”