VANISHING

ARTIST

Jonathan Virginia Green

Jonathan Virginia Green is an artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His work is concerned with themes of pleasure, desire, and transformation that are oriented within a queer/transgender experience. His practice includes painting, drawing, and video. Recently his paintings have taken on “leather sexuality” as subject matter. Green is interested in the ways that psychological experiences driven by material and aesthetics can be mirrored in art making as well as practicing BDSM. The paintings reference performances where Green engages in activities that are rooted in leather/BDSM fantasies. He searches to depict the moment of transition within a scene, of becoming something else.

COUNTRY

United States

PROJECT

My Lover’s Boots #2

In this series, desire and fetish dictate the process behind the painting. In reflecting on how erotic desire is repetitive, as a tape that plays on a loop within our heads, I render my lover’s boots over and over on the surface of the panel, wiping the painting away after each pass. Retracing the contours of my previous drawing echoes the revisiting of the fantasy and I repeatedly render the boots in one sitting until the process no longer gives me any satisfaction. The compulsion to revive the subject of desire, again and again, erodes the specificity of the object. More and more details are lost each time the subject is painted and by the time the exercise is over what remains is a crude trace of a subject that has vanished within the process.