Though “not really a painter” artist, Jonathan Monk has always painted, stating that making art,”…is thinking and painting is a mode of that thinking.” In compliment to his seminal series, None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip, Monk began making oil paintings of the sunset. Not completely satisfied with a 2023 sunset painting, Monk was going to throw it away. Instead he decided to keep it and upon the invitation to create an edition with Alternate Projects in early 2024, Jonathan proposed making the edition around the almost discarded painting.
Complimenting the conceptual trajectory first articulated in the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists shifted their attention away from the art object to the systems and situations that transform it, Monk takes the almost discarded painting, Sunset, and transforms it into Sunset (discarded, rescued, cut, divided & distributed) an edition consisting of 12 unique box sets, each with one of the painting’s equally-cut squares adhered to the box top, and inside housing 11 digital prints, each an image of the other 11 cut pieces of the painting.
Sunset now exists as both presence and absence—at once discarded and conserved, fragmented and conceptually whole.
