Ikon Ikon Paul Ramírez Jonas: Heavier Than Air

This catalogue accompanies Paul Ramírez Jonas' exhibition Heavier than Air at Ikon Gallery, curated by Michael Stanley. (5 June - 18 July 2004)

This was the first solo exhibition in the UK by New York based artist Paul Ramírez Jonas, demonstrating the artist’s remarkable inventiveness in his engagement with technology and technological change. Significantly, Ramírez’s technologies of choice are often low-tech or redundant; a mechanical wind-up camera affixed to a kite, air-powered automata or wax cylinder recordings.

A sense of futile endeavour pervades the work and an almost perverse celebration of ‘failure’ as the unwritten history of technological advancement provides the basis for meditations on much broader concerns such as time, memory and loss.

Paperback