The Friend of the Family

Evoking collective fears surrounding authority, commercialism, and technology, Jonathan Monaghan’s video installations and related prints portray a kind of dystopic fantasy. This piece depicts an idealized bedroom, in which an ominous technological contraption hovers like an alien spaceship. Golden surveillance cameras and stanchions evoke a type of security state. “Referencing Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear, my work subverts Rockwell’s warm, family scene in favor of a glossy, dehumanized coldness, eliciting fears and anxieties surrounding technology and the future,” said the artist, who is based in Washington, D.C.