membership / artist member

Jon Fawcett

http://www.jonfawcett.com
download cv here

Fawcett has held solo shows at the A Foundation (Liverpool), the Elastic Gallery (London), the Space Station Sixty Five (London), and the Inner Spaces Centre for Contemporary Art (Poznan, Poland, 2000).

Group shows include the ICA (London), the Chisenhale Gallery (London), Wysing Arts (Cambridge), the Bonnington Gallery (Nottingham), the Arts Gallery (London), Alma Enterprises (London), Divus (London), h29 (Brussels), the Central House of Artists (Moscow) and the Accademia di Belle Arti (Catania, Italy). Performances have been commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency (London), Hull Time Based Arts (Hull), Fierce! (Birmingham), the National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), the Expo Festival (Nottingham), the Triskel Gallery (Cork, Ireland) and the Anti Festival (Finland).

Fawcett has undertaken residencies in Finland, Germany, Poland and Wales. He completed an HND in Sculpture at Carmarthen College of Art in 1998, a BA in Visual Performance at Dartington College of Arts in 2001, and an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2007.

The inventory of materials used in Jon Fawcett's work reads like a crossword puzzle made from the remixed narratives of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick. On closer inspection each work expands into a larger story which takes us beyond the gallery and into worlds informed by conspiracy theory and new age technology. Forming an obtuse patchwork of evidence and agenda, Fawcett's work quietly explodes reductive, institutional definitions of what is real and what is possible.

Fawcett’s use of extensive research into tropes of conspiracy and media cults have allowed him to bring into focus the fuzzy logic of new age mysticism that is proliferating in the era of networked consciousness. His sculptures, video and performances exude a menacing technical precision and seduce with a spectrum of alluring colours but these are aesthetic camouflage to cloak ideas that question the nature of the mediated reality or as the artist says, ‘a fabric of contemporary mythologies.’

In this delicate weave in which ephemeral ideas become locked into the history of material technologies from surveillance drones to kevlar weave, the artist uses strategies that simulate those which have become common in the uncanny world in which we live, paralleling activities such as business, politics and war, and operating on a dispersed, global scale.

http://afoundations.blogspot.com/2010/08/jon-fawcett-interviewed-by-tom-morton.html