Jon Rafman
About
Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist, film-maker and essayist, working primarily with new media, photography and sculpture. Rafman explores the relationship between technology and human consciousness in works that are composites of materials and ideas, including video footage, images, texts and internet quotes, edited to create poetic new compositions. Employing humour, irony and melancholy, these narratives expose the paradoxes of modernity, technology and the virtual world. Created in 2015, New Age Demanded (Secret Meanings) is part of Rafman’s series, New Age Demanded. The series comprises 3D-printed and robotically carved busts and digitally layered photographs.
New Age Demanded (Secret Meanings) is one of the most abstract works of the series. Rafman used a Greco-Roman bust as a starting point to create this faceless, monumental sculpture, which hovers between human, animal and machine. The pink Val Venosta marble, carved by robots in a marble quarry in Italy before being polished by hand, grounds a visually unfamiliar form with a singular point of origin. Its glossy surface and elaborate curves convey sensuality and movement, as if the work captures a snapshot in the middle of an accelerated mutation. The work’s futuristic and anthropomorphic aesthetic fuses physical and virtual modes of representation.
