Jon Routson (born 1969 in Washington, D.C.) is an American artist working in video, new media, and conceptual art. He is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Jon Routson (born 1969 in Washington, D.C.) is an American artist working in video, new media, and conceptual art. He is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Routson attended Albert Einstein High School [1] in Kensington, Maryland. After briefly attending the Maryland Institute College of Art, he received a bachelor's degree from University of Maryland, College Park in 1993. Routson went on to earn his MFA fromthe University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2003. [2] In between his degrees, Routson worked as an artist assistant under painter Marilyn Minter and video artist Vito Acconci in New York. [1]
Routson briefly taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. [3]
Routson is primarily known for his video work, particularly his use of bootleg recording. Between 1999 and 2004, Routson made numerous recordings of contemporaneous Hollywood films using a handheld video camera inside a movie theater. [4] Routson would balance the camera somewhere on his person and intentionally not look through the viewfinder. The videos often ended up largely obscuring the movie screen, either by angle or silhouette. For instance, Routson's recording of The Passion of the Christ blocked the movie's subtitles behind the back of a theatre seat. [5] While such recordings, known as camrips, are commonly uploaded on peer-to-peer file sharing sites, Routson's works were projected on the wall of art galleries. Routson showed numerous bootlegs in two shows at the Team Gallery in New York City in 2003 and 2004. [2] Routson also created an edit of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4. Routson cut a VHS recording of Barney's film down to a television standard 22 minutes, added television commercials, credits, and an ABC television watermark logo. The work was intended to emulate the ABC program Saturday Night Movie . [1]
Routson work has faced legal complications. On October 1, 2004, Maryland ruled the unauthorized use of recording equipment inside a movie theater illegal. Routson accordingly stopped his bootlegging practice in 2004. [6]
Other of Routson's projects include a photography series in which he takes or purchases photographs of shopping-mall Easter bunnies sitting or standing by themselves, and the 2003 work My Guitar in which Routson displayed his Fender guitar along with a "For Sale" flyer. [5]
Reception of Routson's work has been mixed. One critic praises his Bootlegs, claiming the works give "urgency and pleasure to questions about art in the age of mechanical reproduction, long after the low-tech avant-garde had turned them into truisms." [7] Another, however, describes his appropriation work as "lazy" and "vampiric". [8]
Routson is represented by the Team Gallery in New York City. [9] [10] Below is a list of selected solo and group exhibitions.
Team Gallery, New York, NY, Arcangel, Pinard, Routson [11]
Current Gallery, Baltimore, MD, feel this dead vibration [12]
Team Gallery, New York, NY, recordings II [13]
Team Gallery, New York, NY, recordings [14]
White Columns, New York, NY, Mama’s Boy [15]
MoCA-D.C., Washington, D.C., Jon Routson
Flat, New York, NY, Episode II
Team, Project Room, New York, Carrie/Porky's: Originality, Neatness, and Hygiene
CRP Gallery, Brooklyn, NY and thing.net, Jon Routson's Bootleg
Dooley LeCappelaine Gallery, New York, NY, Free Kittens
John Russell Pope was an American architect whose firm is widely known for designing major public buildings, including the National Archives and Records Administration building, the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, all in Washington, D.C.
Matthew Barney is an American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing. His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well as notable themes of sex, intercourse, and conflict. His early pieces were sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002, he created The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema." He is also known for his projects Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), River of Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018).
Echo Eggebrecht is an American artist and academic known for landscape paintings.
Barbara Gladstone was an American art dealer and film producer. She was owner of Gladstone Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and Brussels.
William Henry Rinehart was a noted American sculptor. He is considered "the last important American sculptor to work in the classical style."
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.
Dana Hoey is a visual artist working with photography, using "the camera to reveal the inner life of women, especially young women." Her photographs are often ambiguous and have multiple meanings. In 1999, in an exhibition entitled Phoenix she showed a series of seventeen black-and-white photo-prints and one forty-one-foot-long digital billboard image; writing in Frieze, Vince Aletti said, "the exhibition is a mystery that bristles with clues but is ultimately unsolved; perhaps it is unsolvable." In her introduction to the catalog for Hoey's 2012 exhibit, The Phantom Sex, at the University Art Museum, University at Albany, curator Corinna Ripps Schaming wrote, "Using both staged and directed photography, her meticulously constructed pictures speak to her deep knowledge of the art and its ability to conflate fact and fiction. Her seemingly spontaneous pictures are choreographed through simple directives and are subject to her ruthless editorial eye, which is always attuned to bringing social dynamics to the fore."
Eugene "Bud" Leake pronounced "Leaky" was a landscape painter and president of the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work was characterized by a consistent commitment to the depiction of the landscape, not following ever-changing trends of contemporary art in the 20th century. In an October 2000 Baltimore Sun article Glenn McNatt wrote that, "For the past quarter century, Leake has been recording that landscape in all its moods and seasons, from riotous sun-drenched spring mornings to the magical glow of autumnal sunsets. His paintings are imbued with an unmistakable sense of place that only one who has lived in and loved the surrounding landscape can create."
Raoul Middleman was an American painter known for his "provocatively prolific work--primarily traditional, including figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes--and for being a megawatt personality." Middleman was a member of the Maryland Institute College of Art faculty from 1961 on. In a 2009 Baltimore City Paper article Bret McCabe described Middleman's paintings as featuring "... expressive strokes, a tight control over an earthy palette, a romantic tone slightly offset by a penetrating eye —becomes distinctive even if you haven’t seen them before, so strongly does he articulate his old-fashioned sensibility in his works.”
Alexi Worth is a painter, curator, art critic, and writer who is known for his conceptually rich and visually graphic works that address modern life and artmaking. He is currently represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York.
Mika Rottenberg is a contemporary Argentine born US based video artist who lives and works in New York. Rottenberg is best known for her video and installation work that often "investigates the link between the female body and production mechanisms". Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Carol Brown Goldberg is an American artist working in a variety of media. While primarily a painter creating heavily detailed work as large as 10 feet by 10 feet, she is also known for sculpture, film, and drawing. Her work has ranged from narrative genre paintings to multi-layered abstractions to realistic portraits to intricate gardens and jungles.
McCallum + Tarry is the professional artistic collaboration between Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, a partnership the artists began in 1999. McCallum and Tarry, who are European American and African American, respectively, are best known for their creative layering of film, audio, painting, photography, and self-portraiture to examine social inequality and the legacy of race in the United States.
Benjamin Abramowitz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City, he is among the most respected Washington, D.C., artists of the past century.
Don Joint is an American artist and curator who lives and works in New York City. His work consists of collage, assemblage, painting, works on paper, and photography.
Rosy Keyser is an American contemporary painter, known for working in large-scale gestural, tactile abstraction. Frequently incorporating found detritus in her work such as beer cans, tarp, and sawdust, Keyser’s work investigates painting and sculpture in a bodily, aggressive way.
Louis Fratino is an American visual artist.
Jim Condron is an American artist working in painting and sculpture. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Baltimore, MD.