2024 Grad Show

Jonathan Dawson Gomez Chavez

AUArts Grad Show move1

VCD – Character Design & Illustration

manchalulu.com

Hi there! I'm Dawson, I'm a Mexican artist eager to tell you some stories! I am a big fan of machines, scary monsters, and swords. My work often involves culture, history, and industry also jumping into dystopia, uchronia, surrealism, magic, and power. My range in illustration, character design, animation, motion graphics, and storytelling has taught me how to get the point across in a flashy explosive way. I like to work in the old Bradbury way, writing tons of words until a combination of them sparks a flame and then I get going with drawings and color! A machine of wonder and terror ready to work!

BURROUGHS

Based on a project to develop a series of 2 books and a commemorative item for an author, I was driven to work with the weirdness and boiling personality of William S. Burroughs, an author so acidic and over the top that strong colors, collage items, and tense relationships between the items are the door and the first warning of what comes ahead: an almost mystical author with a troubled past and even more troubled narratives.

Are we ok?

A collection of three pieces that adapt the homonymous book in three moments of her life, first we have a young girl who is enjoying an evening on the beach on an illustration that intends to be charming, lovely, nostalgic, and pacific. The second illustration has the girl, sleeping uneasy in a car while driving away from it, with a more sharp and sober figures and textures to give the idea of something being lost. But last, an illustration of an old lady holding a picture of the first image of the collection, signaling it to be her and she, happy to have returned to the sea, where she always belonged.

PANIC FABLES

PANIC FABLES has been a critical part of my development as both artist and storyteller after a close faculty member told me how great it would influence me (Thanks Ryan!) I read it and learned so much from it. Jodorowsky is often a mystical and complex figure and while a lot of that is extrapolated in Panic Fables, the book is covered with some raw brutal honest storytelling, point A directly leading to point B and makes the focus of the travel not how will we get there but how nice will it be to see it roll down. Here I have included some of my favorite panic fables I did and the final execution of my favorite one. This book is great, I recommend it and Jodorowsky’s impression of me I hope becomes more evident in my work, as I also have en

IRON COUNTRY

An experiment in world-building where big machines and large calibers are the principles of deterrence and coexistence, Iron Country is a project where I imagined a world through printed media, having developed a propaganda poster, a mail postal, and an invitation to a political event. All of them include certain types of war machinery as a common part of the cityscape or their pride in it.

Ride the Stampede

RIDE THE STAMPEDE is the name of a piece made to be displayed in public and big. I am a huge fan of Calgary myself, and it’s not hard to hear me say that I believe Calgary is like a very early New York just waiting to happen. And while the only thing that looks like New York from Calgary is the average rent, I made this project with the idea of being situated in the city. There are pieces of surrealism in the piece as well as pieces of trivia from within Canada, as representatives of different cultures and Canadian machinery, like the ARGO jet, once one of the most advanced pieces of aircraft in the world. RIDE THE STAMPEDE aims to connect the average Calgarian with a sense of belonging, pride, and color that is proud of his multi

PSYCHIC SWORD

Working with the concept of having an illustration in just analogous colors, I developed the idea out of a DND character, where I have a tabaxi samurai, pretty much a cat Anthro girl with swords. The illustration puts the little character in a path of destruction, running over the rubble of a wall preparing both swords for a strike. Multiple spears are aiming at her already, from enemies caught off guard by the first attack but ready to retaliate before the second one. While it is a strange choice to depict a fight scene in colors of black and blue, which do not communicate that high energy, I wanted to work that intention of night, speed, and unchallenged flow from the main character. It’s like there’s no conflict, just a ghost and a cat.

RING RING RING

A project aimed at representing three stages in the evolution of a character, RING is an encapsulation based on the widely known girl from The Ring, with a twist to make it accurate to the books.

BASILISK RAILWAYS

Three centuries after The Scourge, where the sun turned into bone and the
moons into blood, humanity sits at the brink of nothingness. Space has
become a hellish clouded conglomerate of energy, manifesting into
lightning and evil.
Two twin planets become the last stand of humanity, and a supply chain of
trains moving resources between them is the last effort to exist. These are
the tales of those times, when society can only worry about railways and
guns, and their performance while going through the latest hell to deliver
another day of existence to each other.

This site may contain artworks with provocative content that some viewers may find uncomfortable or upsetting. AUArts supports a culture of non-censorship and ongoing conversations about contemporary art.