Jonathan Zimmerman, Progenitor

progenitor - a person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent.

IFAC Arts and the Yard Lower East Side, in New York presents Progenitor, photographs by Jonathan Zimmerman. An exhibition featuring photographic portraits of retired civilian and military airplanes taken in the United States and Europe. A study of forms. Forms that are mechanical: cold engineering but designed with fluid dynamic grace. There is the surface, which has in many cases has decayed and begins to illustrate the underlying ethos and pathos with which the objects were formed... all a certain system of engineered supernaturalism.

Zimmerman is impressed by is the staggering amount of systems and subsystems that we have created and the limitless variation that is developed in similar types of objects which invokes our impulse and desire to create and attempt to come to a better understanding of our creator. That somehow through ceaseless invention and innovation (i.e. creation) we will eventually attain our day of rest. Through his work he tries to inform himself with an understanding and contextualization of these systems by unlocking the inherent ethos, pathos, and empathy with which they were created.

Zimmerman, born 1971, is a conceptual artist based in New York and received his MFA from Hunter College in 2012.