Jonny Scholes is an emerging artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Scholes’ practice encompasses installation, sculpture, painting, new media and street art. Each of these creative enquiries is linked through an interest in digital geopolitics, the rapid integration of technologies into society and the pursuit of rules-based aesthetic harmony.
Knowledge developed in coding and digital systems has allowed Scholes to build computer programs that help determine how artworks take shape. It has also enabled him to subvert and bend existing systems, such as computer games, modifying their rules to allow access to new digital territories. This sense of discovery has led Scholes in search for unexplored urban spaces, which are then altered through street art.
Through geometric abstractions, Scholes’ paintings map in-between spaces where man-made structures intersect to create sub-regions, often disguised from the public. Each work provides an exploration of these spaces where abstract shapes become like schematics, allowing the viewer to decipher the invisible foundations that underpin visible facades. Scholes’ software-based artworks aim to promote understanding by giving physical form to typically immeasurable digital concepts. This includes self-directed programs developed by Scholes to analyse online activity, which is then autonomously fabricated into a physical artwork or triggers an action within an installation in the real world. These works ask us to reflect on how artificial intelligence and algorithms are already woven into our daily lives, as well as consider how digitally curated information impacts on impartiality and factual accuracy.
Overall, Scholes’ work demonstrates how art remains an effective tool to evaluate personal agency against the growing authority of technology, each of his multi-layered approaches drawing attention to the complexity and abstracted nature of hidden digital mechanisms that now govern our social systems and shape the physical world.
Jonny Scholes has participated in numerous group shows, including artistic collaborations in Melbourne, Adelaide and Bristol. Recent solo exhibitions include Lost Bedrooms [2024] at Schoolhouse Gallery andInterpreted [2023] at Social, which was featured in Vault Magazine’s Forecast section. Recent commissions include new work for MONA FOMA, Dark MOFO, Contemporary Arts Tasmania and Arts Tasmania, as well as being included in significant curated exhibitions, Experimenta Emergence and Hobart Current.
Exhibitions
