Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman recently caught the art world’s attention with his ambitious photo project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a collection of hundreds of images carefully selected from blogs and searches. Hauntingly evocative, the work utilizes extremely personal moments to reveal how digital ephemera and media shape our desires and threaten to define our being. Since his appearance on the international art scene just a few years ago Rafman has garnered remarkable success and this first monograph, produced so early in his career, attests to the pertinence of his practice. Using a wide range of media Rafman blurs the boundaries between virtual and physical realities with works that can be either digital or material, found or made. By moving back and forth from video and photography to sculpture and painting, he brings attention to how such a transformation has become intuitive for us, changing the different ways in which we know ourselves, and how we perceive and relate to the world around us. Though Rafman rarely takes a moral stance toward the messaging behind his art, it consistently asks us to evaluate what it means to be human in the context of these new and ambiguous digital realms. In English and French.