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Opening Reception: April 14th, 6-8p
For the second time, Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new
works by new media artist Jason Salavon. Tragedy of the Commons will showcase Salavon's
distinctive mastery of self-authored software, which source and reconfigure cultural data into
visual compositions. Abstracted into composite images and patterns, statistics and mass culture
become conceptual diagrams for our social insatiability – representational not so much in
figuration, but rather in discerning observation.
For this body of work, Salavon meticulously recorded one week's worth of programming on
three major television stations: HBO, CNN, and ESPN. Composing the millions of resulting
frames into frenetic blocks, stripes, and pixels of color, he typifies the habitual nature of
television programming through a conceptual portrait of demand. Bands of color stretch
across an otherwise variegated backdrop, indicating repeat transmissions, branding strategies,
and scheduling patterns through a purposefully detached surveillance. Presented in a
substantial scale, the teeming motifs become optical white noise – a flurry of input reminiscent
of the media's perpetual besiegement of information. Additionally, Salavon will also present a
stimulating new real-time video work indicative of mass viewership's gluttony. Drawing upon
the Internet's constant feed of current trending topics, Salavon's software generates a graphic
cacophony of images and text related to contemporaneous cyber search keywords, tags, posts,
and news items. Like a frenzied collage, topical pictures and words coalesce into a collective
stream of consciousness – making the work's content definitively ephemeral at any given
second. In a modernized vernacular rooted in Sol Lewitt and Robert Rauschenberg's oeuvres,
Salavon's works stage a social intervention through self-referential visualization, and create an
intricate narrative of control, authority, demand, and subversion.
Born in 1970 in Indianapolis, Salavon obtained his MFA from Art Institute Chicago (IL). He has had
solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Columbus, Washington D.C. Houston, Seattle,
Cologne, Seoul, London, Geneva, Basel and Paris, among others. Salavon's work has been acquired
by the public collections of the International Center of Photography (NY), Whitney Museum of
American Art (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Fine Arts (TX),
Museum of Contemporary Art (IL), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Columbus Museum of
Art (OH) and others. Salavon lives and works in Chicago, IL.
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