Jonathan Virginia Green
Jonathan Virginia Green (b. 1989) is a visual artist currently living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He uses his art to explore mechanisms of desire, pleasure, and transformation that are oriented within his experience as a queer transgender male. His practice includes painting, drawing, and video. He graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA in painting in 2011. For two years (2017-2019) Jonathan served in a voluntary position as the Art Gallery Director for Oklahomans for Equality, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2022 he received his MFA from the University of Arkansas where he was awarded a Graduate Fellowship. Green has exhibited his work across the United States, and recently was awarded a fellowship to attend a studio residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
As a strategy to queer the medium of painting, Jonathan Virginia Green’s work synthesizes the aesthetics of painting and lifestyles of leather sexuality. As practices they are both driven by aesthetics, fetishize material, and can be physically and/or psychologically transformative for their participants. He pushes the illusory qualities of the paint to perverse ends by treating the canvas with a technique to make it look like leather. Other times, the canvas is replaced by paint itself because of the likeness between the acrylic paint skin and rubber.
The materiality and physicality of paint are emphasized within the work to provoke a proprioceptive experience within the viewer. Modified by hardware such as nipple clamps, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational potential of material embodiment. As objects of radical difference, they conflate desire, the body, performance, and identity. By interrogating, fragmenting, and combining painting and leather practices, he creates objects of hybridized experience that appear to harbor their own erotic desires.
