Dancing Between Art & Design
With Space 4 Art celebrating its milestone 15th anniversary in 2024, we simply couldn’t mark the occasion without commissioning a special logo! Enter graphic artist Jonny Hoolko, resident artist in Studio #40 since 2019.
“Working on the 15th anniversary logo for Space 4 Art is everything I love about being a part of this community,” Jonny said. “To be able to use all of my different forms of creative output to help this organization feels amazing, and for this organization to provide us with paid opportunities to support our art practices truly means the world. Much like the spirit of Space 4 Art, I wanted to keep the anniversary logo simple. It should complement the art and imagery of the amazing artists that make up this community.”
Jonny’s work will be on view during our next Open Studios on Saturday, March 23, 2024 from 6:00-8:30 pm. As always, the public is warmly invited to attend this “Free 4 All” event.
A San Diego native, Jonny has a B.A. in Design from UC Davis, with an emphasis on lighting design. The program at Davis, a science-heavy research university, was unique, so Jonny tried to take advantage of that in any way he could, even going “a bit rogue” in terms of his college curriculum. As an intern at the California Lighting Technology Center under Michael Siminovitch— Jonny’s mentor in lighting design —he studied light and health, trying to understand the effects of lighting technology on the human body and our circadian rhythms.
This research also led Jonny down a path of bioart/biodesign, which he pursued under his other mentor, Christina Cogdell. Together they were able to get into a microbiology lab to experiment with bioluminescence and see if they could create a viable product out of firefly and marine algae enzymes. These two tracks of knowledge inform Jonny’s design career and much of the art he has gone on to produce.
“After college I stayed up in San Francisco working as an architectural lighting designer, and got to work on residences for clients who had extensive art collections,” Jonny said. “This exposure really ignited my fascination with modern art and my desire to pursue art as a career in its own right rather than just a skill within my design career. My career since then has been a dance between art and design, sometimes competing for my attention and sometimes working harmoniously as multiple forms of my creative output. Currently, I spend my days as a graphic/packaging designer for a jewelry brand here in San Diego and pursue my art after hours. With the rest of my time, I enjoy running and have been a lifelong volleyball player.”
Working as a lighting designer, Jonny became fascinated with the way light interacted with materials. So, often, that is what informs his material palette: a mix of transparency, translucency, reflectivity, matteness. Jonny finds the juxtaposition of these different things— a matte wood panel next to a highly reflective pane of glass —very dynamic.
“This also is an effective way to capture that mix of natural and artificial that complements the subject matter and tone of my work,” Jonny said. “But really the media is informed by what subjects I am exploring, so it is prone to evolving as I move through themes and ideas. For example, currently the idea of discarded electronics and moss are fascinating to me, but ask me again in six months and it's probably going to be a very different answer!”
As a mixed-media artist, Jonny meanders through many different media over time as the concepts behind his work evolve.
“I would say most of my work can be summed up as a fascination of the intersection between nature and technology,” Jonny said. “Whether that is in the subject matter, material choices, or thematic ideas explored in the work, the tension between nature and man-made structure is where I find the interesting parts of the human condition.”
Jonny’s previous experience as an architectural lighting designer definitely informs some of his more minimalist choices when it comes to materials and construction. He gravitates towards materials that are natural or interact with light in some interesting way— a lot of glass, wood, and metal.
“The art movement I revere the most is the light and space movement of the 1960's, with Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell,” Jonny said. “While my work is not always aligned with these artists, I think understanding that influence helps orient you to the work I make and my interest with perception and more abstracted renderings of the concepts I discuss.”
To learn more about Jonny and his art practices, follow him on Instagram @jonnyhoolko.art and check out these links: