JONATHAN LEWIS

Jonathan Lewis is a London-based photographer who received his BA in Art History from Cambridge University in 1993 and a Certificate in Professional Photographic Practice from the London College of Printing in 1997.
 
Lewis’ work explores ideas of production and consumption in a playful manner, as in See Candy, which samples scans of candy wrappers to produce barcode-like patterns that amuse the eye and rouse the memory. The sensibility on display has been described as “strangely entrancing,” evoking a “Mr. Magoo kind of world,” while his prints “are joyful visual confections.”
 
In his most recent series, WalmArt, Lewis explores one of the more mundane rituals of modern living: the trip to the supermarket. The brightly packaged products arranged in layers and stacked in grids offer up a wealth of visual opportunity which the photographer digitally deconstructs to the verge of abstraction. The markets, reduced as they are to a Lego-land of blocks of color, are undermined in their efforts to facilitate accessibility to their products. Ultimately, however, Lewis is seduced by the bright uniformity of the aisles offering us an aesthetic enthusiasm that reflects our love/hate relationship with shopping, food and 21^st Century living.
 
Lewis’s work is represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, and Cleveland Institute of Art, and Société Française de Photographie, Paris.

Artist C.V.