Laser prints on bond paper, 109x160cm
Produced with the use of a digital flatbed scanner pressed against various terrain in nature, each one of these sculptural prints are a sequence of photographic scans pieced together into a single image.
As life size representations of the land they depict, these works render themselves useless as tools of practical navigation, but instead create models for vast landscape unexplored and unknowable, drawing attention to the relationship between modern ways of navigating and experiencing the world and the natural world.
Jonathan Michael Ray’s art practice largely comprises of works in video, photography and print-based media.
His work is informed by the phenomenon of looking and how, by looking, we might make sense of the dizzying multiplicity of things we continuously see, learn and experience.
He is also interested in looking beyond the things we look for when we look – not purely in the actual things we see, but also in the process by which these things are seen. How do we construct and understand a sense of the self and the existence we inhabit amid the blur of visual stimuli that we are bombarded with on a daily basis?
His projects approach this question through the use of recognisable subjects such as natural landscapes, memory, the Internet, physical technological devices such as computers, and cinema, as starting points.