Johnathan Monaghan: Lush Pixels - Lecture

Curated by Beth Giacummo
February 12 - April 17, 2026

Lecture: Thursday, February 12 from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Campus Center Ballroom A

Farmingdale State College Memorial Gallery presents Lush Pixels, a focused survey of artist Jonathan Monaghan, featuring prints, sculpture, and video produced over the past decade. The exhibition traces Monaghan’s interplay of art history and technology to explore desire, anxieties, and power in the digital age.

This exhibition will be on view from February 12 - April 17, 2026. The Farmingdale community is invited to join us for a special lecture with artist on Thursday, February 12 from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM in the Campus Center Ballroom A, followed by a reception on Thursday, February from 4:30 - 6:30 PM at the Memorial Gallery in Hale Hall.

Monaghan’s practice is defined by a precise and glossy visual language that borrows from the aesthetics of luxury and advertising, while critically examining their ideological underpinnings. Through meticulously 3D-rendered imagery, the artist constructs speculative worlds in which historical references collide with the infrastructure of contemporary digital life, producing works that are both seductive and unsettling.

The exhibition includes selections from After Fabergé, a series of large-scale prints in which photo-realistic 3D graphics are used to reimagine the iconic luxury of the Fabergé egg. Also featured is Soft Power, a body of prints and sculptures appropriating the tradition of aristocratic portraiture, replacing human subjects with opulent assemblages of modern furniture, consumer electronics, and surveillance technology. Here, historical modes of representation become a lens through which Monaghan examines authority, wealth, and the invisible power structures of technological control.

Completing the survey is Gotham, a series of sculptural aluminum prints that transform nineteenth-century New York Beaux-Arts architecture into fleshy, organic surfaces; emphasizing the blurry boundaries between the natural and the man-made in the digital age.

Together, the works in Lush Pixels articulate a critical vision of the present, one in which historical opulence and contemporary technology are inseparable. Monaghan’s practice invites viewers to consider how the visual languages of the past continue to shape our relationship to the digital systems that increasingly govern everyday life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jonathan Monaghan is an artist whose prints, sculptures, and video installations weave together elements of ancient mythology, science fiction, and consumer culture. His work explores the intersections of power, wealth, and technology in the digital age, in an imaginative and satirical critique that challenges viewers to examine their relationship with these forces.

Past exhibitions include Sundance New Frontier, The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has been featured in The New York Times and Vogue Italia. His work sits in numerous public and private collections including The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Microsoft Art Collection. He earned his B.F.A. in computer graphics from the New York Institute of Technology and his MFA from the University of Maryland in 2011. Jonathan grew up in Queens, NY and now lives and works in Washington D.C.

ABOUT THE MEMORIAL GALLERY   
The Memorial Gallery's mission is to serve as a vital teaching instrument and visual resource that enriches campus cultural life as well as that of the surrounding community. This is to be accomplished through the exhibition of imagery related to the communication arts, which represent a wide range of media, cultures, and time periods.  
   
The Memorial Gallery is located in Hale Hall on the campus of Farmingdale State College – State University of New York – 2350 Broadhollow Road (Route. 110).

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