Jon Rafman, Counterfeit Poast, Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, September 17–November 12, 2022

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman (*1981) lives and works in Montreal and Los Angeles and is acclaimed for a multifaceted oeuvre that encompasses video, animation, photography, sculpture and installation. His quasi-anthropological works—often incorporating internet-sourced images and narrative material—investigate digital technologies and the communities they create, focusing on the losses, longings and fantasies that shape our technology-infused lives today. The artist turns an empathic but critical eye on the internet age, investigating experiences of alienation, nostalgia, loneliness and grief. These works explore themes of nostalgia, youth, and false memories, as well as the experience of isolation of individuals from society.

“These technologies allow me to construct rich new virtual worlds. I combine the language of video games and pop culture with classical references to create my own ‘Boschian’ 21st-century hellscape and purgatory.”

- Jon Rafman

The creative, innovative potential of these algorithmically-generated works stems from the artist’s own complex powers of imagination. Rafman’s process begins with text and words; content that is subjected to a calculated, algorithmic process before it ultimately materializes as physical reality.

Consumer technology guides both thresholds of this transformation: CLIP-Guided Diffusion, an image-generating software that converts the artist’s text input into an image, is followed by a printing process that turns the digital image into a material object.

The artifice of this technology-mediated lens turns apparently trustworthy, recognizable motifs on their head, exposing them in ever more grotesque detail. The artist plunders the collective archives of our digital memory, altering ordinary, familiar images to create a nightmarish machine delirium. Rafman’s practice explores the ever-present experience of living in a world in which nothing lasts forever, but nothing is forgotten either.

Jon Rafman (*1981, Montreal) lives and works in Montreal and Los Angeles. Rafman's upcoming solo exhibitions include Sprüth Magers, London, 2023. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022), Ordet, Milan (2022), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021), Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2018), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Muenster (2016), Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal (2015) and The Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015). His works have been featured in prominent international group exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Belgrade Biennale (2021), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Sharjah Biennial (2019 and 2017), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal (2017), K11 Art Shanghai (2017), Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2017), Berlin Biennale 9 (2016), Manifesta Biennial for European Art 11 (2016), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), Biennale de Lyon (2015) and Fridericianum, Kassel (2013).

Jon Rafman

Counterfeit Poast

2022

4K stereo video

Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP