More About Jonathan Pazer |
ABOUT / Biographic Info
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RECENT DEVELOPMENTSIn the Fall of 2018 Jonathan and his wife, Andrea McFarland, also an artist, moved from New Paltz, New York to Mendocino, California. Now Californians, Jonathan is a member of the Writers' Club of Mendocino. They are both members of the Mendocino Art Center, and continue to participate in various member and juried shows there.
In November 2019, Jonathan had his first West Coast solo show of photography and poetry at Mendocino Art Center (Exhibition Info) (MAC), where he exhibited both older images and poems, and a new series of digital pinhole camera images taken in and around Mendocino and Fort Bragg. These new images, inspired by the fabulous coastal landscape, were a unique combination of Jonathan’s long standing interests in origami and photography and were created using a hybrid remote-controlled pinhole/digital camera which he had designed and constructed himself. This novel approach to image capture combined creased paper backgrounds inside a 12” x 12” x 16” black box with a pinhole aperture at one end, bolted to a tripod. Inside this pinhole camera obscura was a remote controlled digital SLR camera that captured the images produced on the surface of the creased paper by the light that entered the box through the pinhole. The Mendocino Art Center exhibition featured these novel pinhole images, many accompanied by a new poem. Following the success of his exhibition at the MAC, in March of 2020, Jonathan was offered an opportunity to join the Mendocino Coast Photographers' Gallery in Fort Bragg, CA. If you visit the gallery you can see his latest photos, his driftwood and wire sculptures, and his current photography and poetry chapbook. He is presently working on material for his second poetry and photography collection which will feature images of the Mendocino coastline and poetry from the MAC show along with other new images and poems. |
BIOGRAPHIC INFORMATIONBiography
Jonathan Pazer is a published poet, artist and abstract/landscape photographer. He is a graduate of Syracuse University, with a B.A. in psychology and an M.S. in Education. He received his Juris Doctor from Union University’s Albany Law School in 1994. Jonathan wrote for his high school literary magazine and participated in poetry readings in college. He kept a private poetry journal which eventually grew to thirteen volumes. Before practicing the creative arts full-time, Jonathan practiced law and was a partner at Pazer, Epstein & Jaffe, a New York City law firm. He retired from the practice of law in 2011 and moved to New York's Hudson Valley where he focused his energy on poetry, art and photography. He began to show his photography there in 2011 and later his ekphrastic poetry in combination with his images. (Ekphrasis, a Greek word which describes the practice of art commenting or responding to art most often across different mediums, e.g., poetry to painting or the reverse.) A founding member of Gardiner Open Studio Tour (GOST) in 2012, in Gardiner, NY. Jonathan later served as the group’s chairman for several years, organizing various member shows, five consecutive artist studio tours and co-creating the #GOSTdoors, a mobile outdoor exhibition of fourty free-standing, artist-member-painted doors that were erected at local events. He showed his abstract photographs and his ekphrastic poetry on the studio tour until he moved to Mendocino, California with his wife, in 2018. With GOST still going strong in Gardiner, Jonathan and several other members of the Tour wanted a year-round community-focused gallery in nearby New Paltz. In 2015, Jonathan became a founding artist-member of Roost Studios, Inc., a not-for-profit art co-op, in New Paltz, NY. He served from 2015 till 2018 on the Board of Directors of Roost Studios Gallery, which showcased contemporary work of Hudson Valley artists, offered community art classes and later provided a meeting space for: Calling All Poets. In 2016 Jonathan had a month-long solo ekphrasis exhibition at Roost. It included more than fifteen of his abstract images with an ekphrastic poem displayed alongside each one. This show coincided with the release of his self-published chapbook, Seven Dimensions of the Unseen, which documented the show’s images, their accompanying poems, and the unusual process involved in producing his abstract images. Jonathan soon became a participating member of Calling All Poets, (CAPS) a Hudson Valley poetry organization that was hosted at Roost. He was later invited to contribute poems and images to Ekphrasis 2017 (Volume 1), a poetry collection published by CAPS. (See "Recent Developments" for more information.) |