DRY SEASON
2 minute loop (2006)
Collaboration with Donna Conlon
What attracts me most about this piece is the very fact that Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker collaborated on it. A collaborative effort which emerged spontaneously from the empathy shared by two artists which have distinguished themselves as being acute observers of their surroundings. As in several of Donna’s works, Dry Season is born of an act of daily life. In this case, the artist’s almost heroic effort to take the glass she consumes in her house to a recycling factory on the outskirts of the city of Panama every two or three months. This time around, Donna brings a photo camera to her recycling excursion. Jonathan, a fellow artist, tags along with his video camera. Both artists marvel at the mirage before them: mountains of shiny, green glass, set in perfect visual counterpoint against the hills of the Panamanian periphery. Camera in hand, for hours they explore all the visual possibilities of the ready-made panorama, all the ways to play in a paradise where breaking bottles is not forbidden. Ecstatic, Jonathan discovers the pleasure of throwing them into the air and smashing them against the others. The artists decide to return with more friends and document a downpour of green bottles with the artificial natural landscape as a backdrop. The result is a video that deals with Donna’s habitual preoccupations with the tensions and transactions between things natural and artificial, once again engaging the concepts of well-being, consumption and social behavior; but now incorporating the additional ingredients contributed by Harker’s innate inclination for the absurd, his sarcastic incisiveness, and his knowledge of structure, rhythm and composition, proper to his education as a filmmaker.
Walo Araujo, 2006