current work:
past work:
When I was on the Island of Nevis, in early 2011, I went for a hike in the jungle by myself and encountered all these monkeys. I was running with them through the jungle getting further and further away from civilization until I started wondering if I was going to be lost. Right at the point when I thought I finally was lost, I had a realization: “It’s impossible to get lost in jungles you fool!” I realized that if anything was getting lost it would be the jungle getting lost in us, us Monkeys. And I was representing King Monkey, the one that chases all the other monkeys around. The monkey called human.
“Went up into the jungle
found King Monkey
kicked King Monkey’s ass
now I King Monkey”
During this same trip I had the word sunshine on my mind. I had been to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico right before I got to Nevis and there I learned about a rumor that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady would drive around the town in a green Mercedes with a naked girl called Sunshine in the back. That story stuck with me. The fact that I visited the site where Neal Cassady died in San Miguel enforced the story further. On Nevis I then encountered a famous local bar called Sunshine’s, owned by a local called Sunshine. That was enough for me to realize that I had to spend a significant time in thought to figure out why I was so obsessed with the term sunshine. After a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that sunshine represented life, or nature, including, but not limited to the inclusion of, the human race. Without sunshine the earth would be dead. Further, sunshine is a constant occurrence on our planet, it is infinite in our understanding.This body of work consists of images that show humans and/or traces of them in environments. It talks about the balance between King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine.
“Went up into the jungle
found King Monkey
kicked King Monkey’s ass
now I King Monkey”
During this same trip I had the word sunshine on my mind. I had been to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico right before I got to Nevis and there I learned about a rumor that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady would drive around the town in a green Mercedes with a naked girl called Sunshine in the back. That story stuck with me. The fact that I visited the site where Neal Cassady died in San Miguel enforced the story further. On Nevis I then encountered a famous local bar called Sunshine’s, owned by a local called Sunshine. That was enough for me to realize that I had to spend a significant time in thought to figure out why I was so obsessed with the term sunshine. After a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that sunshine represented life, or nature, including, but not limited to the inclusion of, the human race. Without sunshine the earth would be dead. Further, sunshine is a constant occurrence on our planet, it is infinite in our understanding.This body of work consists of images that show humans and/or traces of them in environments. It talks about the balance between King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine.
I am very interested in this concept of balance. Is our planet in neutral stability, like a sphere? Whichever way you turn it, it’s balanced within. Are we in positive stability to where however much we pollute and dig and cut around, the planet will eventually always go back to its stable state? Or are we in negative stability and however small of an impact we have on a grand scheme of things this very impact is enough to make the planets stability tumble out of control with zero chance of getting back to stable?
King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine is a body of photographic work in which I address my questions and thoughts about balance.
Jonas Jungblut
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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 California, 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 | Gallery27