Jason Salavon

Last updated

Jason Salavon (born 1970) is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure preexisting media and data to create new visual works of fine art. [1]

Contents

Early life

100 Special Moments (Newlyweds), 2004. Digital C-print. 42" x 31.5". Ed. 7 + 2 APs. Salavon - 100 Special Momemts, Newlyweds.jpg
100 Special Moments (Newlyweds), 2004. Digital C-print. 42" x 31.5". Ed. 7 + 2 APs.

The son of an artist, Jason Salavon was born in 1970 in Indianapolis, Indiana and raised in Fort Worth, Texas (Hill 2004). [2] He earned his BA in 1993 from the University of Texas at Austin [3] and his MFA in 1997 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During and after school, Salavon worked as an artist and programmer in the video game industry. After he earned his MFA, he also designed and taught courses as an instructor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [4] Salavon currently lives in Chicago, where he is a studio artist and an associate professor at the University of Chicago. [5] [6]

Work

Salavon is noted for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure media and data to create new visual works of art. A significant body of Salavon's work involves two general means of manipulating preexisting media to create works of art: first, by overlaying images (such as multiple photographs) and averaging the result to create visual amalgamations and, second, by distributing processed media (such as individual frames of a movie) side by side or in other configurations. An example of the first means is Salavon's 2004 suite of works, 100 Special Moments, which consists of images based on the average of groups of 100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the Internet. [7] [8] [9]

An example of the second method of production is his 2000 work, The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1, which is a static image showing all of the frames of the movie Titanic reduced to the average color most representative of each frame. [10] [11] [12] Salavon employed a similar method in his 2003 series Emblem, reducing films such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to a set of concentric rings of color representing each frame of the film. [4]

A third part of Salavon's work involves the recomposition of statistical data into visual images. For example, in the 2001 works Shoes, Domestic Production, 1960-1998, Salavon organized and transformed a data set concerning the show industry into "psychedelic constellations" bursting with color. A more recent example is Salavon's 2006 work, American Varietal, a commission to transform census data into site-specific art for the new headquarters of the US Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland.

Salvon's public installation American Varietal is installed at the US Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland. [13] [14]

At one point in time, the Google search results for the term "Playboy" placed Salavon's website in a higher position than Playboy's own website. [15] This was likely the result of extensive blogosphere discussion about and linking to Salavon's website for his works Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades, amalgamations showing the decade-by-decade evolution of the "average" Playboy centerfold from the 1960s to the 1990s.

In 2018 Salavon's work Everything All at Once(Part III) was displayed in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition, curated by jonCates. [16]

Collections

Related Research Articles

Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sigmar Polke</span> German painter

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lev Manovich</span>

Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.

Arny Freytag is an American photographer who specializes in glamour photography. He began working for Playboy magazine in 1976 and at one time was one of only two photographers who produced the Playboy centerfold photographs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cindy Sherman</span> American photographer

Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum of Art, Corcoran MPA, Museum of Modern Art CZ and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Ulrich</span> American photographer (born 1971)

Brian Ulrich is an American photographer known for his photographic exploration of consumer culture.

Bruce Charlesworth is an American artist, known primarily for his highly stylized and constructed photographic, video and multimedia works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trevor Paglen</span> American artist, geographer, and author

Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.

Hrvoje Slovenc is a Croatian-American fine art photographer based in New York City. He holds an MS in biochemistry from the University of Zagreb and an MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Marcus</span> American photographer

Ken Marcus is a famous American photographer, best known for his work in glamour and erotic photography with Penthouse and Playboy magazines and for his own website. For over 40 years he has produced hundreds of centerfolds, editorials, album covers, and advertisements. For many years, Marcus has lectured and conducted professional workshops in the US and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glitch art</span> Practice of using technological errors in art

Glitch art is an art movement centering around the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. It has been also regarded as an increasing trend in new media art, with it retroactively being described as developing over the course of the 20th century onward.

Douglas Ischar is an openly gay, American artist known for his work in documentary photography, installation art, sound art and video art addressing stereotypes of masculinity and male behavior. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he teaches art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ischar serves on the curatorial board of Chicago's Iceberg Projects, a not-for-profit experimental exhibition space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shimon Attie</span> American visual artist

Shimon Attie is an American visual artist. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Rome Prize in 2001 and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study in 2007. His work spans a variety of media, including photography, site-specific installation, multiple channel immersive video installation, performance, and new media. Much of Attie's practice explores how a wide range of contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. Much of Attie's works in the 90s dealt with the history of World War II. He first garnered significant international attention by slide projecting images of past Jewish life onto contemporary locations in Berlin. More recent projects have involved using a range of media to engage local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory and potential futures. Attie's artworks and interventions are site-specific and immersive in nature, and tend to engage subject matter that is both social, political and psychological. In 2013, five monographs have been published on Attie's work, which has also been the subject of a number of films aired on PBS, BBC, and ARD. Since receiving his MFA in 1991, Attie has realized approximately 25 major projects in ten countries around the world. Most recently, in 2013-14, Shimon Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tetsuya Noda</span> Japanese artist (born 1940)

Tetsuya Noda is a contemporary artist, printmaker and educator. He is widely considered to be Japan’s most important living print-artist, and one of the most successful contemporary print artists in the world. He is a professor emeritus of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Noda is most well-known for his visual autobiographical works done as a series of woodblock, print, and silkscreened diary entries that capture moments in daily life. His innovative method of printmaking involves photographs scanned through a mimeograph machine and then printed the images over the area previously printed by traditional woodblock print techniques onto the Japanese paper. Although this mixed-media technique is quite prosaic today, Noda was the first artist to initiate this breakthrough. Noda is the nephew of Hideo Noda an oil painter and muralist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silvia Malagrino</span>

Silvia A. Malagrino is an American multimedia artist, independent filmmaker and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for interdisciplinary work that explores historical and cultural representation, and the intersections of fact, fiction, memory and subjectivity. Her experimental documentary, Burnt Oranges (2005), interwove personal narrative, witness testimony, interviews, and both documentary and re-created footage to examine the long-term effects of Argentina's Dirty War. Malagrino's art has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, Palais de Glace and Centro Cultural Recoleta, La Tertulia Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography of Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Rochester Institute of Technology, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Ateneo de Madrid, among other venues. Her work has been recognized by institutions including the Guggenheim Foundation CINE, the Smithsonian Institution, and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Malagrino is Professor in Photography and Moving Image at the School of Art and Art History of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eileen Cowin</span> American artist and photographer

Eileen Cowin is a Los Angeles–based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete. Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Armory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center. Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA), Public Art Fund, and the Sundance and USA film festivals. New York Times critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."

Joyce Neimanas is an American artist known for her unorthodox approach to photography and mixed-media works.

Craig Kalpakjian is an American artist working in New York, known for his computer-generated, photo-realistic renderings of anonymous, institutional spaces. He is considered one of the first artists of his generation to make digital images depicting entirely artificial spaces in a fine art context.

Isabelle Hayeur is a Canadian visual artist known for her photographs and experimental film. Hayeur’s works are inspired by a critical analysis of ecology and urbanity. Since the late 1990s, Hayeur has created public art commissions, photography books, video installations, and has participated in many solo and group exhibitions. Her artworks can be found in both national and international collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Fonds national d’art contemporain in Paris.

References

  1. "What Only Artists Can Teach Us About Technology, Data, and Surveillance".
  2. "Museum of Contemporary Photography".
  3. Communications, Emmis (September 2001). "The Alcalde".
  4. 1 2 "The University of Chicago Magazine: Features".
  5. "Department of Visual Arts • Jason Salavon". Archived from the original on 2007-12-04. Retrieved 2007-12-08.
  6. "Jason Salavon". October 2019.
  7. "Cabinet". 2004.
  8. Anderson, Steve F. (2017-10-13). Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262343343.
  9. Patrick, Keith (January 28, 2005). Contemporary. Art 21. ISBN   9780954673208 via Google Books.
  10. Dormehl, Luke (2014-11-04). The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems . . . And Create More. Penguin. ISBN   9780698158849.
  11. Burrough, Xtine (2012-05-23). Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. Routledge. ISBN   9781136944826.
  12. Steele, Julie; Iliinsky, Noah (2010-04-23). Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". ISBN   9781449390686.
  13. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/about/censuscareers/2011-census-guide.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  14. "United States Census Bureau Headquarters: Suitland, Maryland". 2008.
  15. "Audible City: Jason Salavon - Gapers Block: Detour | Chicago".
  16. "Contents May be Extremely Hot". 23 March 2006.
  17. "Jason Salavon | Portrait (Hals)".
  18. "TBMA |Late Night Triad (2003) Smithsonian". www.si.edu.
  19. "Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1x1". International Center of Photography. February 25, 2016.

Further reading