The series LA Air consists of 400 unique inkjet prints each with a single full-size slide image printed in the center of a square sheet of paper. The slide image comes from a photograph taken by Monk in 1975 when he was six years old. It was taken while on holiday in front of the casino in Saint-Raphaël on the south coast of France. This is the first photograph Monk ever remembers taking, and the man in the picture is Monk’s father, Owen Monk. 

As seen in the repeating images of the slide in this test print, Monk manipulates the color of the sky by showing a gradual shift from one image to the next, a possible reference to fading memory but clearly a connection to Bruce Nauman’s 1970 aritst book, L A AIR with its repeated generic snapshots of LA’s air-polluted skies.

Contemporary British artist Jonathan Monk replays, recasts and re-examines seminal works and ideas of modern, conceptual, and minimalist art often through variously witty, ingenious and irreverent means.