David Kass Interview (for Art Forum)

Jonathan Quinn- Optic Intervention and Photography (September 2007) 

Jonathan Quinn experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts --creating works that investigated the image-making process as sculpture. Such works included ad hoc camera obscures made from abandoned optical equipment. These sculptures projected the found-light from any room onto the backs of old photographs. He also created sculptural works that used floating strips of clear plastic to create an illusion of “writing on water”. Exploring contemporary assumptions about multimedia, By setting up a series of dueling, comparative images --two images placed side-by-side he invites cross-analysis.

Still, Quinn found the argument for conventional pictorial art to be an open question. Mired in an aesthetic impasse, disengaged from both ideological and communicative motivations, Quinn determined to reinvent the picture as a self-defined cultural practice, by creating large, simple silhouette cut-outs of cliché-icons of modern transportation. The simple, silhouetted, black and white shapes function as both a metaphor for the transition of space and offer the simplest arrangement possible to create a recognizable, three dimensional object as a two dimensional illusion.
 (Work from the 70s)

He became involved with numerous groups of artists in New York including showings at Club 57, ABC No Rio, Nature Morte and Group Material. He slowly abandoned the use of optics in a quest to reinvent two-dimensional image making and settled into a style of painting that could encrypt the mechanics of the optical apparatus. His painting process allowed him to re-imagine photography.

Quinn’s latest work neither confronts or denies the mediation of the optical process. Works such as BRUNO (2006) call attention to the subject matter while PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE (2005) self-consciously exploits the evocative potential of the lens. His approach to photography investigates the act of “picture taking” as an attempt to record place and event in its simplest terms and he makes no apologies as to where he points a camera. Still, there are emotional and psychological factors that expose something of both Quinn and the world he lives in and (to him) this is ultimately what matter. The conduit of camera and lens points inward.

-David Kass (based on a discussion with J. Quinn, September 2007)