About the Work
Part of a larger series, Jonathan Monk’s cheeky and critical One in fifty in one reproduces the cover of a box of Ilford black-and-white photographic printing paper, using the number of sheets indicated on the box to inform the edition size. The whole piece is often displayed in a grid, with each gelatin silver print depicting the same sample photograph on the box cover, this one of clothes drying in the breeze, suffused with light and exhibiting the impeccable tonal range of the paper. Addressing modes of reproduction and distribution, Monk began this Ilford series as a graduate student in Glasgow in the 1990s, and has amassed 16 different versions of this conceptual piece, varying in format according to the Ilford product.
About the Artist
British-born artist Jonathan Monk often appropriates ideas, works, and strategies from Conceptualist and Minimalist artists of the '60s and '70s. With photographs, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, his works recontextualize and rework these quotations, often infusing them with Monk’s personal history and working-class family upbringing. These aspects add a humanizing and down-to-earth sensibility to the original works' utopian ideals and notions of artistic genius. Monk's extensions and reinterpretations of seminal works by John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Sol LeWitt, among others, challenge authenticity, authorship, and value in art with quirky humor and wit.
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