[vimeo 100324610 w=640 h=360] Mainsqueeze, 2014

Bizarrely beautiful and shockingly real and affronting canadian video artist jon rafman's work redefines the classical notions of surreal in the techno-digital world we live in today. Caught between a sense of longing for the real to be far more than we believe it can be, his works echo to a moment in time when memories somehow intertwine with our future and strangely seem to evade the present. Re-creating narratives from appropriated gaming footage and re-mixed with original video works he plays with the notion of memory (or is it fantasy) through internet-ubiquity, video-game culture and the fracturing of the real by layering voice-over narratives to redefine the visual experience. Mainsqueeze from 2014 seems to deviate slightly from his game fetish parallels. Here he jump-cuts through sub-culture identity issues, selfishness and digital alter-realities and employs a washing machine to possibly act as a metaphor for societies self imploding overload of 'machine-obsession' resulting from our ubiquitous informational visual engagement - or maybe its just a symmetrical observation of the innevitable cycle of life.

" JR: I find the myth of the irretrievable past to be a very fertile tool in art. I’m interested in the Proustian qualities of certain memory triggers, especially in the form of media that one consumes or interacts with as a child. In Sticky Drama I was using nostalgia as a tool—cultural reference points from the 1980s and ’90s function as a common language for those who grew up with them. The use of nostalgia in Sticky Drama is a manipulative device. It is meant to highlight how the aura of these cultural signifiers is always slipping away. In a Benjaminian way, I simultaneously celebrate and mourn its loss". (source: vdrome)

links:

http://jonrafman.com https://vimeo.com/jonrafman http://www.vdrome.org/rafman-lopatin.html

partly via : https://patrkhenry.wordpress.com