Moving between fashion, art, design and music, the trajectory of Los Angeles-based polymath Jonathan Zawada suggests that the creative impulse is happily impervious to disciplines and forms.

By Alison Kubler FEB 2017

Los Angeles-based Australian artist Jonathan Zawada might just be the poster boy for a new creative model. His multi-disciplinary practice operates across various platforms, from contemporary art and design, to furniture and fashion, such that Zawada is perhaps best described as a creative chameleon. The specific commissions he accepts determine his direction, and yet each project is characterised by the artist’s unique aesthetic, albeit one that is difficult to finitely describe; it is imbued with an inherently contemporary attitude, an interest in the gestures of the past, a 1980s sensibility even. Zawada’s work conflates past and present tropes to create something inherently fresh. His practice is not constrained by its presentation but rather liberated by a freedom of expression. Zawada runs the gauntlet of commercial and non-commercial realms; he has a foot firmly in both the commercial and fine art camps. The art world can be inherently suspicious of the former, and vice versa.

Asked to describe his practice then, Zawada muses, “I’ve had a tough time over the years getting clarity on this question myself but recently I’ve simply settled on the idea that I like to make things — anything at all. I like responding to opportunities as they present themselves and I become motivated by challenges I haven’t explored before, whether those problems are somebody else’s or ones that I have manifested on my own. I think we live in a [moment] which is very much
in a state of everything-all-the-time, and for me, the only honest response ... Subscribe to read this article in full