SANTA FE, NM.- TAI Modern is presenting an exhibition by Jason Salavon: All the Ways. This marks the artist’s third solo show with TAI Modern.
In All the Ways, Salavon explores the innate malleability of data. Often working with massive amounts of data in the millions, he uses the medium almost like playdough. While still representational, the data is squeezed and pushed out into its various different forms. Abstracting and transforming nontrivial amounts of data, Salavon is able to redeploy shared cultural capital, like The Simpsons. Glasstire’s Michael Frank Blair notes Salavon “recognizes what corporations have known for some time: that when culture feeds itself into large reservoirs of data, there’s a host of new, wonderful and terrible things we (and others) can do with it. The artist seems to be on our side in this case. He slices up, compiles, reshapes and reanimates this material in an effort to get at a bigger picture of our culture at large and an outside view to its structure and scale.”
With the piece Master Index, Salavon condenses all 5 million of Wikipedia’s individual articles into a listicle, giving the observer a post-internet look at the collective human id. Ranked by frequency of visit, we can see that Adolf Hitler (#19) ranks one above the Wikipedia entry for Game of Thrones (#20). Sandwiched between Human Penis Size (#44) and Sexual Intercourse (#47) is September 11 (#45) and France (#46). While Dog and Snoop Dogg share neighboring spots at numbers 205 and 206 respectively. Both a look into greater cultural consciousness and an all human knowledge contest for rank, Hyperallergic concludes “the list speaks to our collective desire for bits of knowledge, our need for specific information to guide school projects, solve temporary brain lapses, and settle heated debates. It’s an ordered representation of our information obsession.”
Salavon holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Texas, where he minored in computer science. He previously worked in the video game industry as an artist and programmer. Salavon was named one of the “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists,” by Art + Auction Magazine. His work is featured in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the National Portrait Gallery. Salavon has been honored with recent solo exhibitions or installations at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the US Census Bureau. A professor at the University of Chicago, Salavon lives and works in Chicago, IL.
