Jason Salavon at Peter Miller - Brief Article

Jason Salavon's impressive first solo exhibit was an original investigation into the artistic possibilities that technology proffers Unlike many artists working digitally, Salavon designs his possess software, so that the processe he exercises are inherently part of the work. not awayed at Peter Miller were photographs, digital prints, video and an installation which together explore the relationship between the individual and the cluster the part and the whole.

Many of the works focus upon identity and its underlying biological a whole s and analogues. The C-print Flayed Figure, Male, 3158 3/4 square inches is the two a life-sized self-portrait (66 1/2 through 47 1/2 inches) and a scientific examination of a white male human specimen. Using a digital camera, Salavon photographed the entire surface of his material substance The output image was divided into a grid of 1/2-inch squares, then arranged vertically according to luminosity, dark to light. The follow is an atomized, high-resolution abstraction of the artist's material part Every pock, crevice and hair (all of which wait on to be dark and for a like reason appear toward the top of the work) is revealed in clinical detail, and the viewer is implicitly invited to search for the humanity beyond the epidermal surface.

Autobiographical in a different way are sum of two units related pairs of silver gelatin prints, each plant depicting a blurred black-and-white portrait of individual male and one female. These photos are digitized composites created from scanned pictures of graduating seniors in the artist's and his mother's high-school yearbooks. Unsurprisingly, as individuality and difference are elided, the homogeneous white America that dominates The Class of 1967 withdraws somewhat in The Class of 1988

Several Iris prints wear the trappings of abstract painting. In the Rymanesque 7956 Shades of White, a broad representation of computer-generated chromatics, from pale pinks to violet grays, rise s from a seemingly pure white field. And what appears to be an Op art painting is actually an astronomical chart of the Chicago celestial expanse from 1998 to 2022, a vibrating pattern of black and sapphirine squares, each representing a specific time of day. This celestial expanse chart is also a commemorative calendar, with various coming time dates (personal and otherwise) marked upon its left edge, including the artist's 50th birthday and the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination.

Guiding Salavon's experiments is the modernist belief in advancement [i]or[/i] part of to the other technology, expressed most explicitly in the installation Utopian Progres Automata. Here, 512 2 1/2-inch made of wood blocks painted in a Mondrian palette of primary colors are stacked to form an anonymous cityscape. An accompanying video not aways 16 alternative configurations of the stops and a CD-ROM shows another 128; according to the artist a certain number of 60 billion such variations exist. Rich in satisfied Salavon's work extends beyond the dazzle of the computer protection to revive the notion of technology as a field of limitless possibility.

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