[Jason Salavon’s] ultimate concern is to reveal the larger implications of how we process information, and how it is processed for us. It is the effects of computer technology on our perception of reality and cultural identity that his self-designed software programs play with in their transubstantiations of facile statistics into abstract patterns and images.

Jane Harris art/text

In his first solo exhibition at the Feldman Gallery, Jason Salavon will exhibit photographic prints, video work, and real-time software installation. A new media artist, Salavon’s custom digital processes reconfigure masses of communal material, from the private to the canonical, to create a visual idiom that calls into question the boundaries of representation in the digital age.

The exhibition features Spigot (Babbling Self-Portrait), 2010, a three-part video installation based on the artist’s own internet searches – over 11,000 queries for more than two years – that have been reconstructed and reformatted from Google archives. The real-time work, which provides a deeply personal and voyeuristic glimpse into the artist’s private search habits, comprises multiple modes including both literal text and resampled psychedelic data-streams. 374 Farben, 2007 is a large-scale light box in which each page of the 2007 IKEA catalogue, whose annual printing is thought to have surpassed the Bible as the most published print work in the world, has been simplified into rectangles of pure color, presenting the catalogue as modernist abstraction.

In Still Life (Vanitas), 2009, a video panel based work, a presumably static mammal skull transforms imperceptibly over the course of four hours. Several other hyper-realistic photographs similarly explore the theme of evolutionary phenomena through a lens of historical painting. In a series relating to specific Old Masters, four prints each average scores of portraits by Rembrandt, Hals, van Dyke, and Velazquez, yielding atmospheric meta-portraits. Other prints quantize separately the palettes of select paintings by Monet and Rubens to create composites that reflect abstract color archetypes.

Salavon recently completed a three-year commission by the U.S. Census Bureau in which he sculpted two centuries of population data from roughly 6,000 U.S. counties into a 40-foot-long, 10,000-pound piece – part abstract mural, part video animation.

Jason Salavon lives and works in Chicago. One person exhibitions have been mounted at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea; and the Dutch National Foto Institute in Rotterdam. His work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other public institutions.