Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman (b. 1981) is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the concept of the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. His artwork has gained international attention and will be exhibited in late 2015 at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal). He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View (9-Eyes).

Biography

Rafman was born in Montreal, Canada. He holds an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from McGill University. He lives in Montreal.

Work

Rafman’s work focuses on technology and digital media, and emphasizes the ways in which it distances us from ourselves. He offers a way to look at the melancholy in our modern social interactions, communities and virtual realities from an accessible place of humour and irony. His films and art are hauntingly evocative and utilize extremely personal moments to reveal how pop-culture ephemera and advertising media shape our desires and threaten to define our being.

He’s explored the identities and history of some of our most common virtual worlds— Google Earth, Google Street View and Second Life

Though Rafman rarely takes a moral stance toward the messaging behind his art, it consistently asks us to evaluate what it means to be human in the context of these new and ambiguous digital realms. Rafman celebrates and critiques contemporary culture, while at the same time revealing the origins of modern loneliness and alienation.

An ongoing project of Rafman's involves a tour around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar Kool-Aid Man. The work deals with how users employ creative exploits in order to bring to life an idealized self and entertain sexual fetishes in the virtual world.

Exhibitions

Rafman has been in various group exhibitions including Rencontres d’Arles; New Jpegs, at the Johan Berggren Gallery in Malmo, Sweden, Free, at the New Museum in New York, and Speculations on Anonymous Materials at The Fridericianum in Kassel. He has contributed to exhibitions at New Museum (2010), The Saatchi Gallery (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2010), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2012), Palais de Tokyo (2012), and The Fridericianum (2013).

He has also been in several solo exhibitions, including, Annals of Time Lost, at Future Gallery, Berlin (April 2013), A Man Digging, at Seventeen Gallery, London (May 2013), and You Are Standing in an Open Field ( Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, Sep 2013).

In September 2013, Rafman collaborated with Brooklyn-based experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never on a film to accompany the release of R Plus Seven (Warp).[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

Publications

Rafman has been featured in Modern Painters, Frieze, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine and Artforum. In the book Communicating the Archive: Physical Migration published by the Regional State Archives in Gothenburg, Rafman's work was presented, as well as an essay by Ph D Sandra Rafman, on the archival impulses of Rafman's work.[11]

References

  1. ↑ Tim Walker (2012-07-25). "Google Street View photographs: the man on the street - Features - Art". The Independent. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  2. ↑ "The street views Google wasn't expecting you to see – in pictures | Art and design". theguardian.com. 2012-02-20. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  3. ↑ "Jon Rafman's Surreal Google Street View Accidents (PHOTOS)". Huffingtonpost.com. 2012-02-27. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  4. ↑ "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View: a photo project by Jon Rafman". Telegraph. 2012-02-21. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  5. ↑ "The Portraits of Google Street View - Alexis C. Madrigal". The Atlantic. 2010-11-09. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  6. ↑ Rafman, Jon (2012-05-04). "Interview: Jon Rafman, The lack of history in the post-Internet age". eyecurious. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  7. ↑ "Jon Rafman and Rosa Aiello: Remember Carthage". New Museum. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  8. ↑ "Global Entertainment". The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-09-16.
  9. ↑ Twerdy, Saelan. "Jon Rafman: Mapping Google - Canadian Art". Canadianart.ca. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  10. ↑ Jon Rafman (2009-08-12). "IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View". Artfagcity.com. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  11. ↑ Karl-Magnus Johansson (2013), Communicating the Archive : Physical Migration, The Regional State Archives in Gothenburg. ISBN 978-91-979866-3-2

External links

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