ARTIST STATEMENT
We live in a moving composite of memory, language, culture, and evolution. Sensation arrives as light, vibration, pressure—data. But the mind doesn’t simply record it. The mind edits and predicts, building an experience that helps us survive and stay coherent with others. Accuracy is secondary. “Reality” is a useful construction, always slightly behind, always slightly wrong.
A society’s ideas, especially beauty, are part of that construction. Beauty is not a property of objects; it is a shared decision applied to them. It binds us, guides us, and points toward the futures we desire. But like any model, it expires. The world changes. The old agreements fail to describe what’s actually happening.
Every model has an edge: the place where the labels run out and the data won’t behave. At that edge, patterns are still only patterns. Meaning is not guaranteed. To stay there, to look without resolving, is uncomfortable.
I think of art as the slow work of bringing something back from that edge: a series of experiments, revisions, and wrong turns that eventually yield new forms a culture can use. New beauty is not discovered whole; it is assembled, tested, argued over, and absorbed. That is one way societies evolve and remain relevant.
My work takes the form of machines that stage this process materially. They test perception, physics, time, and entropy, systems that drift, synchronize, break down, and reconstitute. The goal is not a fixed message, but an encounter: a moment where the viewer feels the model of reality hesitate, and beauty becomes a live question again.
Generalmotion@gmail.com
917-309-3053
712a Peralta St. Oakland CA 94607
ART CV
Jonathan Schipper is a sculptor that has combined many materials and techniques as far-ranging as pneumatics, leatherwork, robotics, and rock n roll. His work is often based on decay or destruction, work that becomes most alive just before it ends. He embraces the transitory nature of existence and rejects the sacred. He feels art should be an experience, not a possession. Many of his ideas are derived from media, but the work is physical, live, and irreproducible.
Jonathan holds a BFA and an MFA, but he feels his true early art education was at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2001). He now lives and works in Oakland CA. He has concentrated on large-scale engineered technology-based artworks that find their inspiration at the foundations of function and recognition. He has been shown worldwide in shows like the Guangzhou Triennial and "Under Destruction," Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, among many others.
Jonathan is best known for his Slow Motion Car Crash, where two full-sized cars are brought together over the course of months to simulate a head-on collision. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision is expanded into days or years. In this sculpture, the subject becomes the balance of creation and destruction, movement and time itself.
Jonathan's work is both very conceptual and very approachable. It deals with questions of perception, life, and destruction but is just as likely to entrance a five-year-old as the veteran art viewer.
Email: generalmotion@gmail.com
Phone: 917-309-3053
BORN 1973. Chico, California Lives and works in Oakland CA
EXHIBITIONS
2025 "Vertical Hold" Punch Projects, Thorp, Washington
“Unknown Frontier”, Techne Art Center, Oceanside, CA
2024 “30th anniversary show”, Pierogi, Manhattan, New York
2022 “Elektra : 6th International Digital Art Biennial (Bian) Metamorphosis -2022” Montreal CA
2021 “DUEL” RSOAA, Brooklyn
2020 "At Any Given Moment” PIEROGI New York
2019 “Campsite” Wassaic Project New York
“Detritus” Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada
2016 “Cubicle,” Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX
“Slow Motion Car Crash,” The Armory Show, Pier 92, New York, NY
“Rage for Art (Once Again),” Pierogi, New York, NY
2015 “Explosion” Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, Texas
2014 “State of the Art,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
2013 “Detritus,” The Boiler, Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
“The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA
“Homeward Found,” The Wassaic Project, NY
2012 “Slow motion car crash” Locus+, 16 Saville Row, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
"Guangzhou Triennial 2012: The Unseen. Theme and artists," Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China. Curated by Jiang Jiehong and Jonathan Watkins
"Nostalgia Machines," David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI
2011 “The Art of Deceleration,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (Group Exhibition curated by Chris Sharp and Gianni Jetzer)
“Slow Room,” Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany (One-person)
“Under Destruction,” travel to Swiss Institute, NY, NY (March 15–May 28, 2011)
“Autobody,” Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX
“Subjective / Objective,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (Group Exhibition)
2010 “Under Destruction,” Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (Group Exhibition curated by Chris Sharp and Gianni Jetzer)
“CyberArts 2010,” Festival Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
“Poesie der Bewegung,” Automobil Forum, Unter der Linden, Berlin, Germany
“Meta.Morf 2001: New.Brave.World Biennial for Art and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
“No Customs,” Abu Dhabi, UAE
2009 “Irreversibility,” The Boiler (Pierogi), Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
“Chelsea Visits Havana,” Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba (February 28–May 17
“Confict: Today’s Art,” The Hague, The Netherlands
“Heavy Metal,” Ramapo College, New Jersey
“Firebird,” Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
2008 “Pieces of the Whole,” Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (Sept. 28, 2008–Jan. 25, 2009)
“The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” Stuks Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium
“Apocalyptic Summer,” Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (Group Exhibition)
2007 “Firebird,” PIEROGI Brooklyn, New York (One-person)
ARTEFACT, Stuks Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium
2006 “Factitious,” PIEROGI Brooklyn, New York (June–July) and Leipzig (Nov-Dec)
2005 Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (One-person)
2005 Momenta, Brooklyn, NY (Performance, Invisible Jet)
2003 “Cirque de Medecine,” Paperveins Museum of Art, New York NY
2001 “Invisible Jet,” GAVS, Brooklyn, NY
2000 “Parts,” Goliath, Brooklyn, NY
EDUCATION
2001 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
1996-98 MFA. Sculpture, Rinehart School of Sculpture, Baltimore, MD
1992-96 BFA. Sculpture, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA