Humanity is currently undergoing a gigantic shift. We are moving from an analog world into a digital one. We can now, for the first time, send physical energy across the globe in an instant, be present anywhere in the world at any given time. When a people undergo shifts of this dimension, tension and stress are unavoidable.

At this point the first generation who has never lived a completely analog life is starting to reach maturity and with that, steering power. The result is tension. Tension in society between persons still maintaining an analog lifestyle and those who live a largely digital life. In this scenario people yearn for balance.

My mind is occupied with this scenario. I create work that aims to articulate my thought processes about balance and tension.

These pieces are made from steel and are under constant tension by gravity and/or human input (mounting them under tension to the wall). While under tension they also talk about balance. Those concepts occupy my mind and thoughts constantly and this series lets me combine them and open up questions about the relationship between balance and tension.

UNTITLED METAL#6
Stainless steel, steel, paint
28″ x 43″ x 21″

UNTITLED METAL#7
Stainless steel, steel, paint
61.5″ x 28″ x 26″

This one is an odd one. It is really hard to photograph, it has angles that are hard to understand, the colors are unusual, there are polished and natural surfaces to the stone, overall it somehow is a struggle for me. But then it is probably the most “true” sculpture I have built to date. There is a lot of pressure and tension in my life right now, things aren’t quite as easy. I feel like this sculpture describes that rather well.

T3-5
granit, domestic marble, Belgian Black marble, stainless, brass, epoxy
21″ x 12″ x 10″

Another image from King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine made it into a group exhibition. This time in Fort Collins, CO at the Center for Fine Art Photography (link) for their upcoming “Simply” exhibition.

In the Alps
facemounted chromogenic print
30″ x 30″

Two of my images were selected for an upcoming group exhibition at Gallery27 in Santa Barbara. The show is called “THE PATH” (link).

Here are the pieces:

Mexican Path
facemounted chromogenic print
20″ x 20″

Nevitian Path
facemounted chromogenic print
20″ x 20″

A couple of days ago at the Four Seasons Maui I was asked to catch a lizard for a photo. This questions stirred up something deep. Back in Austria, when I was maybe eight years old, I went to a river with two friends and one of them caught a lizard, rammed a stick through its torso and put it on a little wooden raft to go down the river. It was incredibly cruel to me at the time but I got over it (or maybe not…). Now, 22 years later and thousands of miles detached, upon that question the event popped back into my mind and I felt horribly wrong even scaring a lizard. I couldn’t stop thinking about that lizard since and played with all kinds of drawings of lizards until this ended up on the wall of my hotel room at the Four Seasons Lanai… I should install a camera to get the expression on the maid’s face upon entering the room…

paper on wall, scotch tape
216″ x 85″

“Mirror Mirror”
chromogenic prints on mirror at Four Seasons Maui
62″ x 40″

“Mirror Mirror on the wall, who am I and what am I doing here…”

I went back into the archives and selected some work that I had done back in Berlin in the 90′s. Those years were a strong influence and I am now mounting toner prints of them on wood with glue. This basic (or as my close friend EMCE would say: “Biasics”) approach seemed fitting, giving the work a very raw quality, like Berlin in the 90′s.
“Back to the Biasics”
toner print on wood, glue, paint
22.5″ x 35″

My piece “Social Scene” has been invited to be juried by David Hickey for the Texas National 2012 exhibition (link HERE). I shipped it to Texas a couple of weeks ago and the selection of work for the exhibition should be publicized soon. This piece is part of my body of work King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine.

I guess I just combined my “Straight from the Minibar” series and my work with Negative Stability. This took about an hour and seemed impossible for most of that hour. Stood for a good 15 seconds.

Almost exactly one year ago I was standing on these train tracks in the early hours of the day in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico, a beautiful cobblestone town in the heart of Mexico with lots of little cafés, bars and galleries and rooftop restaurants. I was there for ten days and early into the trip found out about the history this town shared with the Beat Generation writers and fore figures. Particularly Neal Cassady who had passed away there in 1968. Cassady being the inspiration to countless stories, most famously as the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This was sensational!

I had read On the Road for the first time when I was about fifteen or sixteen and it has been with me ever since. I see Kerouac as part of why I chose to change continents and move from Germany to California. And here I was in the town in which, as the myth has it, Kerouac and Cassady drove around in a green Mercedes with a naked girl called Sunshine in the backseat.

I started doing some research and discovered that Cassady had supposedly attended a wedding party near the train station in February of 1968 and after leaving the party decided to walk the tracks south towards the town of Celaya only dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He only made it about two hundred feet down the tracks and some workers found him in the morning in a coma. The cold night, it was February at an elevation of about 6000 feet, must have got him and he died in a nearby hospital hours later.

So one morning I got up early and took a cab down to the train station. The cab drivers name was David and he was very excited when I told him that this was my second name. He barely spoke English and I had close to zero Spanish for him. He told me his son was a mechanic in town, repairing suspension. I pointed at the cobblestone roads and replied: “Perfect job!” Now David was really entertained. His daughter, he kept explaining, was living in Modesto, in California and she was going to school there for something I forgot but he insured me that she was very smart. We drove down Canal Street towards the train station, Sunshine was peeking over the mountains and I was on my way to look for a dead man around the train tracks at the outskirts of this Mexican little town that had seen so much of what I had been exposed to in writing.

I asked David to wait for me for thirty minutes while I was looking for Cassady. I walked down to and past the old train station, crossed the road which was intersecting with the tracks and walked south. Right around two hundred feet from the train station Sunshine was peeking over the hills and shacks and there Cassady was. He said hello and told me to keep wandering. I acknowledged and we both turned to continue on our path.

David was sitting in the cab. “Go now?” “Yes,” I said and the engine started. David wanted to show me the best view of San Miguel on the way back so we drove into the hills off Canal to the north. We stopped and looked east. I believed him that this was a magnificent view for sunset but at this time of the day Sunshine was blinding us and we kept driving. I asked him to drop me off at Bar LaCucaracha and smiling he agreed.

T3-81 is displayed at Cielito Restaurant in Santa Barbara during the opening party of Taconic Builders.

T3-81
Granite, Carrara Marble, Belgian Black Marble, stainless, brass, epoxy
26″ x 8.5″ x 10.5″

granit, stainless, brass, epoxy      /     Carrara marble, domestic marble, stainless, epoxy
26 1/2″ x 14″ x 11″                                                                32″ x 29″ x 12″

I’ll be at PhotoLA (THE 21st ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL LOS ANGELES PHOTOGRAPHIC ART EXPOSITION SANTA MONICA CIVIC AUDITORIUM / JANUARY 12 – 16, 2012) on Saturday January 14th showing work from my body of work King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine. This is a great opportunity to chat about this series and learn about what inspired me to put it together.

25in x 12in x 9in
granite, stainless, brass, epoxy

I met this guy at the Ritz-Carlton.

Wallspace Gallery in Santa Barbara is showing a group exhibition called “Multiple Exposures” this December. My Image “Luenersee” is part of this group show. The image is part of my series “King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine” which was on display at Gallery27 in Santa Barbara this late summer and which talks about the balance between the natural and the man-made. Click HERE to see more images from this series.

Face mounted chromogenic print
76cm x 76cm

Here are two recent stone balance sculptures. The colorful one is lava rock on marble and the other one is domestic granite.

untitled
granite, brass, stainless steel and epoxy
58.5 cm x 26.5 cm x 26.5 cm

untitled
lava rock, marble, paint, brass, stainless steel and epoxy
66 cm x 33 cm x 35.5 cm

I have been spending time on the permanent Negative Stability Porsche and wanted to share an update. The images below are digital composites of a model I built with a 1:18 scale 1973 Porsche 911 RS. The model was covered in fiberglass and (at this point) digitally colored and then placed in these environments. I balanced the model with the help of our good friend gravity. The real car is too heavy to balance by hand so the individual pieces need to be suspended and then connected at the proper point. Doing this with a small model proofed to be quite a challenge since there is not a whole lot of weight to work with.
The real Porsche 911s Targa used for this project is waiting patiently to get back into balance…

To find more info click here:  http://jonasjungblut.com/the-permanent-negative-stability-porsche

balanced porsche (digital composition)

balanced porsche (digital composition)

balanced porsche (digital composition)

define direction

I encountered this tree while on a hike through the Rockies in Vail recently. I stopped and could not believe how this simple change of alignment completely questioned all my accumulated understanding of direction. Context is everything!

permanent Negative Stability is opening this Thursday at Viva Design! I have been working on this concept and the challenges that come with creating these sculptures for a a few years and I am very excited to exhibit these pieces now. The concept of balance has been driving my thoughts for a while and the work presented in this show is a strong statement about that. I would love to see you at the opening…

permanent Negative Stability

Reception
September 1st 2011 / 5-8pm

private showings
September 2nd 2011 – September 4th 2011
(please book a showing here)

Gallery
Viva Design Studio
123 E Carrillo Street Santa Barbara CA
93101

Photography’s subject from the beginning has been looking at or away from man.
In these times, as resources both manufactured and natural seem to be scarce,
the question of how we balance them, which way we look, where we focus, is of
high importance. The recording of our mark and stain on the earth has been a
common theme, but it is most truthful when placed in the context of an ever
regenerating nature.

King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine is part journey, part play, part
surrender, but most of all a search for balance. A balance between the ways
humans interact with the environments they are in, fecund, arid, light, watery.
These images are landscapes, both external and internal that we are invited to
enter.

Preceded steps pave a path, and it is our choice to follow or blaze anew, to
climb to the top of a mountain and plant our flag, or quietly fit within the 
environment that surrounds us. Upon entering any landscape we have to decide
how to interact with it. Why choose one way over another?

It was the Beat Generation’s work and style that brought Austrian artist
Jonas Jungblut to California ten years ago to study photography. Jungblut was
raised in West Berlin, Germany, where he saw first hand the shifting political
environment and witnessed the end of the Cold War. With family in Austria and
Germany, Jungblut split his time as a youth between the Austrian Alps and a
divided then reunited Berlin. Since leaving Europe, he has traveled extensively,
photographing, sculpting, searching for balance.

The esteemed photographer Robert Adams said of landscape images that included
the people that inhabited them, “the people stand there virtually in the way;
yet, at the same time, they establish the vast dimensions of the pictures and
thus reassure us that they and we are not all-important.”

This is a journey that struggles to reconcile being both King Monkey and
leaving a mark on this environment, and embracing the hope from the Infinite
Sunshine in the surrounding landscape.

Jesse Groves | Brooks Institute

Thank you everybody for a wonderful opening on August 4th! The show will be up until September 30th, if you are in town, please swing by… Here are a few photos of the exhibition.

I also wanted to send out a special thanks to Jesse Groves who curated this show and was heavily involved in the process of creating this exhibition.

I want to further thank Dr. Peter Jungblut, Elisabeth Drese-Jungblut, Rebecca Farmer, David Obst, Jane Gottlieb, Loredana Gaudioso, Marcus Elliott M.D., Alessandro Gentile, James Dewhirst, TC Reiner, Don Riddle, Christine Jackson, Kimberlie Bloodworth, Terrance L. Reimer and ROMAN for their support, input and criticism.

Artist Statement

the exhibition space

art fans

Carrara Marble

The opening of King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine is coming closer (Thursday 5-8m / Gallery27) and today SBartsblog.com and eventsubmit.net posted about the show.

Looking forward!

permanent Negative Stability from Jonas Jungblut on Vimeo.

I drove up to Oakhurst, CA yesterday (I clogged 1000 kilomters in 12 hours, just a fun little drive…) to pick up the pieces for King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine from West Coast Imaging. Here is a sneak peak of one of the pieces. They all look stunning. Terrance (pic) was incredibly great to work with and I can’t wait to see these hung in less than 2 weeks!

at West Coast Imaging

King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine was also mentioned on Shaun Kelly’s blog here.

Utah Sunrise

Balanced Utah Sunrise stone sculpture. Part of the permanent Negative Stability Series.

Utah Sunrise on granite base
68cm x 38cm x 36cm