The Farmingdale State College Memorial Gallery opened its spring season with Lush Pixels, a focused survey of artist Jonathan Monaghan featuring prints, sculpture, and video produced over the past decade. Curated by Beth Giacummo, the exhibition is on view February 12–April 17, 2026, and traces Monaghan’s interplay of art history and technology to explore desire, anxieties, and power in the digital age.
Monaghan’s practice is defined by a precise, glossy visual language that borrows from the aesthetics of luxury and advertising while critically examining their ideological underpinnings.
Through meticulously 3D-rendered imagery, he constructs speculative worlds in which historical references collide with the infrastructure of contemporary digital life, producing works that are both seductive and unsettling. His prints, sculptures, and video installations weave together elements of ancient mythology, science fiction, and consumer culture, exploring the intersections of power, wealth, and technology in an imaginative and satirical critique that challenges viewers to examine their relationship with these forces.
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 that appropriates 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 transforms 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.
Monaghan’s work has been shown at Sundance New Frontier, The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, NRW Forumin Düsseldorf, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has been featured in The New York Times and Vogue Italia and is held 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. Monaghan grew up in Queens, NY, and now lives and works in Washington, D.C.
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.