Johnathan Green | Needful Stones

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Jonathan Green, “Needful Stones,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb. 8th, 7-9 p.m.

This exhibition of a series of lithographic prints and intaglio prints and drawings explores the relationship between humans and stone.

Jonathan Green’s powerful prints and sculptures treat stones as beings capable of influencing us. This opens up the possibilities rock holds, including that they might want to work with an artist to make a drawing. This contemplative exhibition invites us to see what happens when we pay attention and allow our intuition to guide us.

Green has long thought of lithography as a collaboration between stone and human. To print from the stone is to learn it’s quirks, it’s subtle responses or come across ‘ghosts’ of its history. The variegated texture of Manitoban Tyndall stone, believed to be created by creatures burrowing through the mineral, promises even more interaction – an inhuman agency. It demonstrates participation in what Jeffery Jerome Cohen has termed “an ecology of human-lithic enmeshment” (Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, 2015). Meaning, a relationship in which rock and human a/effect each other. This implies a boundary between animate life and inanimate life that is more permeable than we currently imagine.

The stones in these artworks are propped up, or, “shored up” as if the artist is trying to align or assist them through crude means. By working with stone, and of stone, Green is collaborating with a cold but (perhaps) sympathetic companion.  One that has seen catastrophe before. More than simply inert resources to extract, copper and stone may help guide us through changing notions of time and place. Helping us conceive of blueprints beyond our limited frames of reference in the face of calamity.