Stark and violent at times, artist Bree Jonson's depictions of various kinds of wildlife, from dogs and rabbits to sea anemones and urchins, harness allegory to explore human nature and human relationships with the natural world.
Read MoreArtist Bree Jonson was raised in Los Baños, a province rich in wildlife three hours from Metro Manila. This early proximity to wildlife is self-evident in the natural theme of her paintings.
Spending her adolescence in Davao, Jonson completed a degree in industrial engineering at Ateneo de Davao University in 2012. Pursuing creative ambitions, she attended the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, for one semester before dropping out. Continuing to paint, she further developed her technique apprenticing under painter Jason Montinola, and poring over art books.
While coming to exhibit internationally, Jonson remained based in Manila until the time of her unexpected passing in 2021. On 18 September, the artist's body was found in the Flotsam & Jetsam Artist Beach Hostel in San Juan, La Union resort, Philippines. Her companion Julian Ongpin (son of prominent businessman and former Trade Secretary Roberto Ongpin) was detained for questioning, but subsequently released. Bree Jonson's mother has requested further investigation.
Jonson's art revolves around her paintings and drawings of plants and animals, rendered in the aesthetic and scenery of illustrated fables and storybooks. Jonson portrays her wild subjects as realistically as possible, often in quotidian scenes of frenetic motion and violence.
Works such as Democritus (2014) demonstrate the approach Bree Jonson takes to her work, portraying wild and domestic animals engaging in a manner that befits their true nature. A pack of dogs disembowels a deer in an Arcadian landscape. In other oil paintings and pastel drawings scenes of animal mating and fighting ensue.
Jonson's works in 2017, New Dogs: Old Vices Art Informal show is emblematic of her allegorical subtext. Domesticated canines are shown dogging around in eerie outlandish terrains. The Body Of The Man You Were (2017), presenting a humorous dogpile of different breeds, takes a tragic tone as each presents an expression of discontent and resignation to their entangled fate.
Uncomfortable allegorical semblances to human experience in scenes like these break down anthropocentric separations of man and animal. In later works such as those shown at Yuvuz Gallery in Notes on Stillness (2019)—Jonson's first solo show in Singapore— Jonson presents animals in moments of rest and contemplation. One offers a canine riff off of Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), a scruffy dog staring pensively into the misty beyond.
In 2017 Jonson began to reference life under the sea in her works, culminating in the show Writhing (2017) at OUR ArtProjects Kuala Lumpur. The paintings in the show present sketches and paintings of various sea urchins and sea anemones in various seabed settings and in various states of digesting their prey.
Her interest in these muses is how they writhe and move in a struggle to be alive, something readily relatable to the human condition. Seen as beautiful, these creatures are also known to be deadly when provoked.
Bree Jonson's 'Tigress' (2018) series leans more towards anthropomorphism than earlier works. Standing upright, the tigress adopts human feminine sexualised poses. In some paintings, the lines between human and animal is further blurred, drawing out the shared common drives between animal and human for survival, asserting dominance and satisfying desire.
Bringing ideas from her paintings to three-dimensional form, Bree Jonson also made small and large sculpture and installations.
Jonson's wooden Urchins (2017) have been a recurring feature in her exhibitions since 2017. All black with sharp spikes, they typically appear together in floor installations, either scattered or stacking up like a swarm or virus. Serving as a metaphor for dual perceptions of human femininity, they appear beautiful but deadly, as Jonson once said of them 'they look dangerous, and they are, but they're also fragile.'
More playful in nature, Jonson's resin sculpture Elephant In The Room (2019), enacts a visual pun. Four full scale elephant legs, painted pink, stand alone as if the rest of the elephant stands invisible, being partially ignored.
In her 2021 solo show ZZYZYX, Bree Jonson also experimented with video installation. On a bank of old TVs, the artist plays a series of scenes, filmed in collaboration with the artist's friends, of a woman undressing before disappearing. Connecting to the broader themes of the exhibition, which delved into the Philippines' endangered exotic birds, the woman, like a caged bird, performs, teases and vanishes.
Jonson's select solo exhibitions include: ZZYZYX, Art Informal, Manila (2021); Notes on Stillness, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore (2019); Argh! Screamed they who were sucked into the orifice, Underground Gallery, Manila (2016); Therion Mythos, OUR Art Projects, Kuala Lumpur (2014).
Bree Jonson also appeared in the following select group shows: Displace, Embody, UP Vargas Museum, Manila (2020); Contemporary Chaos, Vestfossen Kunst Laboratorium, Oslo (2018); Statim Finis (The End of All Things), Stephen Romano Gallery, New York (2016); Re:view, BenCab Museum, Manila (2015).
Bree Jonson's website can be found here and Jonson's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
