Jonathan Ehrenberg is a video artist who lives and works in New York City. He received a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from Yale University. Jonathan has exhibited work at venues including MoMA PS1, Horton Gallery (NY), Earl McGrath Gallery (NY), Futura Center (Prague), and Espacio Minimo (Madrid), and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, and The L Magazine. Jonathan teaches at Pace University and Parsons School of Design, and has participated in residencies at the Islip Museum, Harvestworks, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Please visit www.jonathanehrenberg.com for more information.

In my videos, I layer rough materials like plaster, cloth, and cardboard to create a textured environment that resembles a three-dimensional, habitable painting. While my sets, characters, and plots feel surreal and stylized, they also have a sense of emotional truth. My goal is to bring viewers into an alternate world where logic and physical laws are suspended while depictions of emotion become vivid and honest. I want the story to feel real to the viewer in the way that a fantastic dream can feel real—on a visceral level.

My projects are often inspired by literary sources--including Elizabeth Bishop, Nikolai Gogol and Japanese Folk tales--that portray a character's uneasy relationship to a world in flux. In my videos, involuntary transformations and spatial distortions disorient the protagonists. One character begins losing pieces of himself and slowly takes on the qualities of a tree, another scales a building and is able to climb through the moon as though it were a hole in the sky. A house transforms into a forest or floats across the ocean. The natural world in these pieces functions as both an idyllic setting, and as a wild site of the unknown.