| I see it every day. Technology has the potential to be both creative and destructive. Telecommunications, for example, while used for entertainment, also carries with it the news of disaster, human fatality, and war. Yet these horrors reach the eyes of Americans in the form of innocuous electronic communications that can be muted, or simply erased with the remote control. The things that we choose not to see, however, are the bellwether of a civilization in decline. Well past the carrying capacity of the planet, and encountering an epoch defined by continuous emergencies and the scarcity of natural resources, western civilization is ironically at the height of its technological complexity. From an artist’s point of view, this complexity, and this decline is an opportunity. |  |
Jason Varone
Jason Varone, Diagram Abstraction, 2006. Single channel video, 1:30 sec. loop. Courtesy of the artist.I see it every day. Technology has the potential to be both creative and destructive. Telecommunications, for example, while used for entertainment, also carries with it the news of disaster, human fatality, and war. Yet these horrors reach the eyes of Americans in the form of innocuous electronic communications that can be muted, or simply erased with the remote control. The things that we choose not to see, however, are the bellwether of a civilization in decline. Well past the carrying capacity of the planet, and encountering an epoch defined by continuous emergencies and the scarcity of natural resources, western civilization is ironically at the height of its technological complexity. From an artist’s point of view, this complexity, and this decline is an opportunity.
Just one look around the city and I see a kind of spacelessness: ubiquitous billboards, video screens with moving images on moving vehicles, abstract architecture plastered with advertisements, and people walking around with hand-held devices equipped with global position systems. All of this distorts my sense of perspective and results in a grotesque alteration of the physical world. Whether this perversion of physical space is intentional or not doesn’t change a glaring reality: our landscape is under siege by several forces that exist outside of the natural order of living things. To make art about such a place, about such a world, is a challenge to the established formal languages of art. In my case, I have combined landscape painting with video in an attempt to fully depict the diverging tendencies occurring in the world, and in art.
My videopaintings are composed of appropriated electronic communications—both visual images and sound—fused with painted and drawn elements. The result is video that exists in a physical space and outside the confines of the screen. These videopaintings supersede the ephemeral nature of video, while directly connecting technology to the tradition of painting. This relationship is also a reflection on the relationship between nature and technology as manifested in reality.
I have always wanted my artwork to open a window onto reality. With an insatiable appetite for information, and a desire to create landscape painting I have invented a format that bridges several divides. Most important of my concerns is engaging viewers in the subject matter of my artwork: a struggling civilization and a potential collapse of complex systems. Re-contextualizing common media sources as well as using more obscure artistic references and gracefully simple imagery, I am able to address politicized subject matter in a seemingly docile manner, which enables viewers to feel comfortable around my work. My installations include comic imagery as well as appropriated media—languages that are common to the average person. The accumulative effect, however, is a window into a dangerous and colorful abyss accidentally stumbled upon, interrupting a previously successful avoidance of these unsolvable issues.
