Ghost of Progress, single-channel DVD, 2002

project
For the 1:100 exhibition, Paul Ramirez Jonas scours the neighborhood for stray bricks, bringing them into the gallery and building a section of brick wall. Although dividing or supporting nothing in particular, the unused bricks are given an optimistic second life as work of art.

profile
Paul Ramirez Jonas is an artist living and working in New York City. He has a survey show up at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England traveling later this July to Cornerhouse, Manchester, England. He has had solo shows at LFL Gallery, NY, New York, Roger Bjørkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, Sweden, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Postmasters Gallery, New York, Studio Guenzani, Milan, Italy, White Cube, London, England, Jack Tilton Gallery (Project Room), New York, White Columns, New York and Artists Space (Underground Project Room), New York. He has participated in an extensive number of group shows both nationally and abroad. Among them: Cultural Territories International, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany in 2003; Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More... On Collecting, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2002; Globe>Miami

This will be the UK’s first solo exhibition by New York based artist, Paul Ramirez Jonas. The exhibition presents a large body of work from the last ten years and explores the artist’s fascination with the re-discovery of low tech and redundant technologies such as clockwork cameras, air-powered automata and wax cylinder recordings. A sense of futile endeavour pervades the works and an almost perverse celebration of ‘failure’ as the unwritten history of technological progress provides a platform for the discussion of much broader concerns such as time, memory and loss.