WAH-WAH x JONATHAN ZAWADA

 Spend some time exploring the hidden, liminal spaces of our postmodern hyperreal situation, and sooner or later you will come across Australia’s own Jonathan Zawada. At home in both traditional and new mediums, Zawada interrogates and blurs the boundaries between art and design, analogue and digital, the real and the unreal.

For Zawada, technology is no mere tool. In his hands it frequently becomes the raw material of his art: data becomes landscape, shattering the distinction between subject and technique. His is a world in which craft and code collide and combine in uncanny and unexpected ways.

"Goats Head Soup is created from a mathematical formula used to model fluid dynamics and interactions on a two-dimensional plane. The goat head is now associated with the satanic but the original representation of this was the Sabbatic Goat, drawn by Eliphas Levi in 1856 to represent the ideal of a perfectly balanced society where opposites exist in equilibrium. The design is a kind of union of science and magic - to me, science (in particular maths) is magic which permeates our entire universe. The psychedelic whirls and swirls of fluid dynamics represents something similar to me, a mixture of order and chaos, motion and stillness, information and entropy, looking into them is like watching billowing clouds where all sorts of visions manifest themselves."

-Jonathan Zawada

An 1856 depiction of the Sabbatic Goat by Eliphas Levi.