Jon Rafman’s new exhibition 𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦’𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾 features both algorithmically generated paintings and video works that utilize permutations of appropriated content, encompassing everything from fine art to mass marketing material.

Jon Rafman’s new exhibition 𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦’𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾 features both algorithmically generated paintings and video works that utilize permutations of appropriated content, encompassing everything from fine art to mass marketing material.
Colloquially familiar as abracadabra, the Hebrew phrase “ebrah k'dabri” translates roughly to “I create like the word.” Besides this expression having boundless religious, historical, and cultural connotations, it also describes the text-to-image algorithm employed by the artist to produce this most recent body of work.
Rafman incorporates the rich vocabulary and visuality of the Internet to develop poetic narratives that critically engage with the present, creating works that capture the tension between the indifferent eye of the machine and the human impulse to find meaning.
“I’m interested in this age-old question of what it is to be human and what it is to experience the world. And I think technology has always reflected how we experience the world, who we are as individuals, and how we relate to ourselves, each other and the past.”–Jon Rafman
Rafman's major video work Counterfeit Poast, consisting of images created with the same AI image generation technology as the paintings and animated using face-tracking iPhone apps, concludes the third-floor presentation. Composed of a sequence of character-study vignettes, Counterfeit Poast explores the interrelation of crafted online identities and memories with intimate personal identities and memories, and how it is that one constitutes and distorts the other.
“I am actually trying to fight nihilism. But I fight it by telling stories that create meaning, even if the stories are about confronting the darkness and potential meaninglessness and the horror of reality.”–Jon Rafman
Trailer for Jon Rafman, Punctured Sky, 2021
In Rafman's video work Punctured Sky – shown in the gallery’s basement – the viewer follows a former gamer through eerie environments on his destabilizing search for a computer game that seems to have disappeared without a trace. The film resembles a so-called “creepypasta” – a horror legend that is modified, copied, and circulated on the Internet with vague or anonymous origins. Punctured Sky touches on interpersonal relationships, the trials and tribulations of one's memory, and the dynamic psychology of an isolated, atomized individual.
All installation views by Ben Westoby
Welcome to the exhibition for
Jon Rafman
𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦'𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾
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