Today's queer artist feature is 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. After graduation he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Chautauqua School of Art for a summer residency. 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. Currently he is working to complete his MFA degree in painting at the University of Arkansas where he was awarded a Graduate Fellowship.
Recently, Green's work synthesizes the aesthetics of painting and leather (i.e. BDSM, kink, fetish) as he is interested in the overlapping concerns between the two. As practices they are driven by aesthetics, fetishize material, and can be physically and/or psychologically transformative for their participants. He pushes the limits of 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, another eroticized material. By interrogating, fragmenting, and combining these practices, he creates objects of hybridized experience that seem to harbor their own desire.
Jonathan Virginia Green
The Art of Being Queer