Jason Varone

It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great, May 2013

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present "It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great" featuring a new, site-specific installation by Jason Varone for May 2013.  In this multi-media project for Grizzly Grizzly, the Brooklyn-based artist combines wall drawings of smoke plumes with a projected animation of animals falling from the sky. Simultaneously, a black & white video of explosions from aerial drone attacks is intermittently decorated with washes of color over a sublime, melodramatic soundtrack.

Varone refers to his work as ‘videopainting’–an intersection of static drawing with moving images as a new way of painting for the Information Age. His work is rooted in both landscape and technology, treating the landscape not as a vista to be rendered by the artist, but rather as a physical representation of the unseen data that flows through it. Appropriated video from news footage and electronic communications are projected through space and merge with physical symbols of the landscape rendered in paint, making associations between the complexity of technological advancement and the destruction of the natural landscape. The invisible data of the ethereal landscape, brought to light through Varone’s video projections, reveal an underlying narrative of malevolence quickly escalating towards disaster.

Artist Bio

A graduate of New York University, Varone lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His artwork has been exhibited in many venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Boston Center for the Arts, The British Film Institute, The International Center of Photography and Art in General in New York City.