I am currently engaged in production of mixed media, two-dimensional, video, and literary works. The work endeavors to construct a narrative from disparate fragments, frequently found, and to reinterpret abstracted information as it is mediated without context. My ability to digest the media which I encounter by: articulating its rhythm, highlighting its purpose, organizing its remnants, reassembling its pattern, or renaming its parts, serves to monitor my degree of detachment from what I receive and how I respond. Information without context is too easily shrugged off as arrhythmic, incomprehensible, or an attribute of chaos. Operating by their own system of self-reflexive poetics, my work occupies a peculiar space between humorous sarcasm and playful earnestness. It seeks engagement in dialogues about the nature of perception. Works may be seen as pedestrian meditations, circular in their ambulatory pattern, which investigate shared ideas of “beauty”. These works, rhythmically composed or marked, present a new iconography: as easily adorning cathedral walls as computer desktops. They are methodically built, somnolent, and self-contained. They illustrate difficult relationships with digital immediacy, remediation, and divided human experiences. I persist optimistically in a selective organization of meaning. Despite my best attempts to develop conclusive narratives, my results are many times distracted, elusive, or thin. Finished works thus function equally as testaments to my failures as to my successes in perceiving relationships between what I gather. As I remove myself from the rhetoric of postmodernism and modernism, I encounter a visual language that speaks in response to the past, painfully aware of irony, yet persistently hopeful in aim. It is tempered sincerity rather than casual cynicism. It garners an appreciation of history rather than its cavalier abuse. It presents the reading of oneself into tradition rather than a blasé search for a favorable niche market. Work in this language turns cultural shrapnel into “refined matter”. To learn more about Jonathan Chamberlain please email him at chamberlainster@gmail.com