Jonathan’s New Works project (working title: The Garden) is loosely
based on a recent dream set in his childhood home. The dream features animal faced
figures, packs of birds, and a magician who grows children in a strange garden. This
garden is the central element in the dream, and he has created a sculptural video
piece that aims to capture the feeling of that space. While at Harvestworks Jonathan
learned After Effects and experimented with different approaches to computer
animation–finding ways to bring organic and naturalistic movement into a program
that can often feel stiff. For the project, Jonathan traced the movement of
mushrooms frame-by-frame, and created masked moving shapes. He then filled the
shapes with cross-dissolving, morphing sections of scanned watercolors. In the final
piece, these organic elements are rear-projected onto a plexiglass sculpture modeled
after the house from my dream.
