Jonathan Rattner is a lens-based artist who primarily produces experimental nonfiction film and videos. His material usually consists of fragmentary images of the everyday, which are reassembled into unexpected configurations in an effort to draw attention to the forgotten, the ignored, the banal, and the unseen. In his work, Rattner seeks to offer an open and elastic aesthetic experience that reimagines our physical and temporal landscape and invites viewers to interact with what they see and to create meaning by reflecting on their own experiences, ideas, and truths.
end, end, end: 2013
8 minutes, 45 seconds
end, end, end is a cinematic essay about the dying of a loved one, inability to make coffee, and the desire to remember things that have been forgotten. It is a work woven around a found audio recording of an American Poet using his voice to mark, in various ways, the beginning and end of his analog audio reels.
FOR ISSA: 2012 video
11 minutes, 14 seconds
A travelogue composed as a series of visual haikus in the spirit of 19th century Japanese poet and wanderer Issa. Through a distillation of impressions, the haiku poets of Issa’s time sought to express moments in a crystallized state. In order to capture experience as a unity and totality, the haiku structure consisted of two elements: the first represented the object, condition, or situation; the second represented perception. The desired result was a nexus of self and world.
Footage for this work was gathered over a two year period from various locations, including Thailand, Japan, New York, Iowa, Oregon and Tennessee.
all night looking
at my wrinkled hands
autumn rain
— Issa —
