Jason Salavon: Old Codes

Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon‘s distinctive fusion of art and information technology has positioned his work at the forefront of digital art practices. Salavon’s projects often coopt and reconfigure data from popular culture, investigating the interrelationship between the part and the whole or the individual and the group. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context.

Old Codes is comprised of ten works — an LCD panel displaying a hyperreal vanitas still life constantly (yet almost imperceptibly) in flux; four prints that each average dozens of portraits by an Old Master (Rembrandt, Hals, van Dyke and Velazquez); two prints of fictional computer-generated skulls; two prints that quantize the palettes of select paintings by Monet and Rubens and organize the results in concentric squares; and a digital projection of visual patterns derived from a backlog of the artist’s own Internet search history. The works in this exhibition, while varied greatly in both form and concept, all offer new perspectives on the intersection of art history and contemporary existence. Salavon continues to bring meaningful structures forward, sampling from the dense field of visual and statistical debris that surrounds us.