Jonathan Zawada Biography

Jonathan Zawada is a terrifyingly skilled maker. Artist, yes. Designer, yes. Collaborator, also. Art Director, that too. Shaper-shifter, certainly.

Zawada’s is a practice that skips fluidly between object design, sculpture, video, installation, painting, 3d simulations and fashion. Finding its roots in his earlier experience in web design, coding and animation, Zawada’s mind seems to want to constantly bend and play with the sin and symbols of our real and virtual landscapes. This fascination he has with the juxtapositioning of the virtual and the lived experience plays out with ever-extraordinary attention to simplicity and perception.

The beginnings of Zawada’s practice have given him a keen eye and thoughtfulness toward the psychological make-up of our ever ‘-present’ world. His work takes on complex data structures, mixed with analogue elements, and renders them out in a way that underlines the temporality of human experience. This process of transmogrification leads to curious, deft and
The works borrowed from Claude Shannon’s developments in sequential binary operations. Shannon saw that Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic was useful when simplifying the arrangement of electromagnetic relays. Through this simplification Shannon was able to construct logical yet unique numerical relationships. In Zawada’s ‘paintings’ this need to re-arrange and simplify the complex, is demonstrated by the relationship our eyes have to the understanding of light, and therefore depth. These simple works ran on a profoundly complicated idea. Each work was received by each set of eyes as 3D, but 3D in different ways, ways unique to the observer’s height, angle and the physical make-up and length of the eyes in question. Both the ray itself and the perceiver are in a state of continuous process, which are also discrete to each