XIBT Magazine / Interview with Jonathan Monaghan

Jonathan Monaghan in conversation with Alexandra Gilliams

Jonathan Monaghan is an artist working across multiple mediums, including installation, sculpture, and print, with a common thread exploring the fragility of dependency placed on technology and consumerism. Using video game software and 3D printers, his haunting, yet playful pieces merge historical references with sci-fi, and morph contemporary anxieties into surreal, technological outcomes. In other words, the outcomes of a hyper-capitalist, technological society if it were to further develop and eventually succeed.
By using classical, Baroque motifs, Monaghan intersects the future with the past through the repulsion evoked by decadence and exhibitionism, aligning it with similar feelings induced by social media and consumerist culture. Soft-looking cushions have been manipulated into obscure shapes, and are superimposed with electronics and golden surveillance cameras. Others tend to be ambiguous, resembling commercial products or spaceships mimicking Fabergé eggs, complete with cameras and consumerist objects created for convenience, such as bike-share stations and vending machines. Monaghan has created a new world: a dystopian, consumerist police state under the seductive guise of gilded ornamentation and decadent imagery.