Jonathan Korotko - 2020 Spring Resident
Jonathan Korotko is an artist who works with fiber in sculptural form. He visually and critically investigates domestic interiors in terms of gendered power dynamics. Working with yarn and string, Korotko wraps objects and creates new skins for them, cloaking and distorting the often sexualized associations of the original. Playful hand-rendered and applied surfaces create alternative imaginations of opulence and theatricality. He wants people to think about the significance of ornamentation and decoration as part of political mobilization in feminist and queer history. He received his MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and has exhibited across the United States as well as internationally. Jonathan has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow School of Art and Franconia Sculpture Park, and will be a resident at PlySpace and The Studios at MASS MoCA in 2020.
Korotko’s work looks at how exotic animal imagery was incorporated into ornamental designs and patterns that covered all manners of wall surfaces and furniture in eighteenth-century France, England, and the Netherlands. The popularity of these designs and objects was part of a program of cultivating aesthetic taste that focused on exotic animal imagery as signifiers of class and as vehicles of desire. The pursuit of the exotic spoke to imperialistic ideologies of territorial expansion and the acceleration of consumption as part of fashion under colonial modernity. Korotko would like to combine this historical research of how taste and desire were formed through exotic animal imagery with his long standing interest in perfume bottles. After all, perfume bottles hold scents that are associated with romantic pursuit, which has historically been coded in predatorial terms.
While at PlySpace, Korotko worked on a new body of sculptures that would incorporated fiber-based materials that allude to exotic animal commodities, be it feather, fur, leather, or ivory.
He collaborated with the Cornerstone Center for the Arts to teach a workshop on Rendering Through Material. Unfortunately, the spring term was cut short due to COVID-19, be we are thrilled to have been able to hold the workshop before the lockdown began. Below are images from the workshop.
