Jonathan Lanier

Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Artist statement

My sculptural practice stems from a compulsion to understand how materials behave in relation to one another. I pay attention to how one material moves, resists, deforms, supports, or changes another, and vice versa. I’m constantly developing questions about these interactions and setting up conditions in which I can attempt to answer them. Rather than trying to understand materials through observation alone, I learn through repeated experimentation. I make adjustments, rebuild, and develop systems that allow materials to respond to one another. I am drawn to metal for its permanence, its ability to retain evidence of what has happened to it, and the range of behaviors it exhibits under heat, force, and pressure. I build structures from high temperature metals such as steel and iron and introduce molten, lower temperature metals such as aluminum or bronze into them. These structures initially function as tools. They direct, contain, and distribute the molten metal. As the metal moves through and around them, it cools, accumulates, and eventually locks itself into place. In the finished work, the distinction between tool and object begins to collapse. The system built to produce the form becomes part of the form itself. I think of these works as studies of mating, investigations into what happens when two materials are brought together and made to occupy the same space. One material is deliberately designed and fabricated, while the other develops through its own agency....

Artwork