Artist Jonathan Sims.

Installation        Painting        Print       Curation
About/CV        Contact        Instagram        Store
Bridge Between Moments in Time (2021)

Digital projection, LEDs, wood, dichroic acrylic, mirror, motors
10x8x4 feet

This installation is an invocation of the interstitial moment in which the world finds itself, the liminal space between the old normal and whatever new shared experiences which are to come in the post-pandemic world. This piece combines lumia light art with computer generated polygons, all of which are reflected and distorted through novel materials such as mylar and dichroic acrylic.

A Bridge Between Moments in Time was part of Illusional, a group exhibition in a ChaShama space at 7 14th St., New York City.
Enoptromancy (2021)

LEDs, mirrors, motors
Variable Dimensions

Created over the course of a week in spring 2021, the Enoptromancy assemblages are an exploration of the capacity of mirror reflections to generate geometric compositions. These pieces are the result of subtle changes in placement, duplication, light angles, and color. The title is reference to a form of divination that uses mirrors, commonly to reveal truths about emotion, ailments, or the future.

The experiments culminated in a piece for the Holocenter’s Light Windows program on the nights of May 14-16, 2021: three rotating mirror assembages were rear-projected and viewable from the street at Flux Factory in Long Island City.
Song for Sickness (2020)

LEDs, lenses, transparency film, DMX controller and dimmers, wood, canvas, dichroic acrylic, mylar 8x12x18 feet
Commissioned for Light Windows by the Holocenter
Flux Factory, Queens, NY


A Song for Sickness began as a desire to represent the immense emotional energy I expended during a period of self-isolation in the first ten days of quarantine, desperately asking the universe for intercession and wellness to alleviate my symptoms and anxiety. It is also an inheritance of the countless prayers and spells that human beings have devised over the millennia to ask the universe for healing or strength to accept the potentially permanent changes that the virus could bring as a new norm in my life.

The work is about the constant evolution that every individual undergoes throughout life, and the unique beauty in that growth. This durational nature of the piece is punctuated by a collage of abstracted symbols that represent our psychic reverberations to these changes.

Though this piece came about in a moment dominated worldwide by a single virus, my intent is for this invocation to gather energy to all people for whom illness is a part of their lives. I also want to acknowledge those currently at greatest risk, whose tenuous existence is even more precarious because of the failures inherent under capitalist institutions. These include the chronically ill, those with compromised autoimmune systems, the elderly, the caretakers, and the workers--all of whom are being asked to make sacrifices to uphold the very economies and institutions which have already been failing them. I ask viewers to not only consider this work as a potential conduit for healing, but as a meditation on the complex relationships with sickness experienced by all human beings.

Tree of Heaven (2020)

Digital projection, dichroic film, prisms, wood, turntables, mirror, vellum
8x6x7 feet
Paradice Palase, Brooklyn, NY

For the last four years, a tree has bloomed outside the window of my studio at Flux Factory. By summer, a worker from the next door comes through and attempts to rip it out to protect the building's foundation. But by the next spring this tree of heaven grows back, a little thicker and a little taller. The leaves cast subtly swaying shadows and light into my studio, and the movement of the light has become a huge inspiration for me. These patterns and movement become the source of light in this installation. Reflected through multiple lenses and filters and broken into multitudes, on these late spring nights in 2020, the light fills new windows.

Tree of Heaven was part of the Holocenter’s Light Windows exhibition, a worldwide exhibition of socially-distant light installations.
Invocation for the Solstice (2019)

LED bulbs, lamps, lenses, wood, transparent film, DMX controller modules
30x30x12 inches
Flux Factory, Queens, NY

An Invocation for the Solstice uses analog projectors to engage the possibilities of additive light. Theatrical lighting equipment adds a time-based component and allows the juxtaposition of multiple geometries throughout a cycle. The shapes in the center of the piece are iconographic representations of the sun (a massive curve relative to the other bodies), the Earth (in the center) and the Moon (which is portrayed in syzygy to the other celestial bodies).


2019-12-21 23:19:00 -05:00 (2019)

Electroluminescent wire
1x1x132 inches Flux Factory, Queens, NY

2019-12-21 23:19:00 -05:00 is a single strand of electroluminescent wire extending from the ceiling to the floor in a straight line. At the moment of the winter solstice, this line will point directly at the location of the sun in the sky on the other side of our planet. This nearest star provides the energy needed to sustain all life on Earth, and our individual and collective relationship with it has been a constant for the entire existence of our species. It is natural that we recognize this with ritual and time-keeping.

Both of the above pieces were included in the exhibition Solstice at Flux Factory from December 21, 2019 to January 1, 2020.