Jonathan Michael Ray: Dark Chambers: In the Viewing Room

Dark Chambers by Jonathan Michael Ray brings together new works by the artist, exploring the space between the tangible and the imagined. Installed in the Viewing Room, the works traverse monoprint drawings, cast lead plaques, engraved stone, and stained glass. They pay homage to memorials, ruins, and memento mori, evoking ideas of absence, loss, and the passage of time. Yet graver associations are tempered by a sense of invention. Familiar symbols and historical fragments enter unexpected dialogues, creating ambiguous narratives, and a seemingly arcane visual language that is at once sacred and everyday.

Anchored in collage and assemblage, Ray’s practice begins with collecting objects, artefacts and discarded materials loaded with cultural and medium-specific associations. Rather than presenting these materials and their past lives as something fixed or recoverable, Ray disrupts, transforms, and reimagines them along with references drawn from archaeology, folklore, literature, architecture, art history, and vernacular traditions. The resulting artworks feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary—materially grounded yet strange, and often elusive. They ask questions about how we construct meaning from the surviving fragments of the past, and open up playful conversations around faith, knowledge and the imagination.