Jon Rafman (born 1981) is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal)[1] and
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.[2] He is widely known for exhibiting found images from
Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).[3][4]
Rafman's work focuses on technology and digital media, often using narrative to emphasize the ways in which they connect users back to society and history. Much of his work focuses on melancholy in modern social interactions, communities and virtual realities (primarily
Google Earth,
Google Street View and
Second Life), while still bringing light to the beauty of them in a manner sometimes inspired by
Romanticism. His videos and art utilize personal moments intended to reveal how pop culture ephemera and subcultures shape individual desires, and will often define those individuals in return.
Kool-Aid Man in Second Life
Rafman's Kool-Aid Man in Second Life project consists of films and participatory tours around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar, a 3D render of the
Kool-Aid Man. Rafman conducted these tours live, inviting audience members to take part in the exploration of the virtual world as he guided and contextualized the experience [5] Kool-Aid Man in Second life is a quasi-ethnographic tour of the wildly varied fantasies invented and pursued by denizens of the web's murkier corners.[6] Rafman describes this project as an exploration of new communities that formed as the internet became a ubiquitous aspect of modern life.[7]
Collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never
In September 2013, Rafman collaborated with Brooklyn-based experimental musician Daniel Lopatin, better known by his stage name
Oneohtrix Point Never, on a music video for Still Life to accompany the release of
R Plus Seven on
Warp Records.[8] The two later collaborated to create a two-part music video for Sticky Drama, from Lopatin's 2015 album Garden of Delete.[9]
Nine Eyes of Google Street View
In 2008, Rafman started Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a long-term archival photo project which uses screenshots of
Google Street View images as its source.[10] These images from across the world are arranged in a massive database and published in books, on
blogs and as prints for his various exhibitions.[11] Rafman later began to keep an ongoing
Tumblr blog where he would post his Google Street View images.[12]
Dream Journal
In 2016, Rafman's animated feature-length film Dream Journal premiered at the
Sprüth Magers gallery in
Berlin.[13] Inspired by Rafman's habit of recording and animating his dreams, the film through a series of dream episodes explores the effects that technology and the internet have on the human psyche. Rafman has called the process of working on the film a form of "worldbuilding" with the desire to create a Boschian-like vision of our current hellscape.[14][15][16][17] Its musical score was created by
Oneohtrix Point Never and
James Ferraro.[13][17]
Career
Jon Rafman's oeuvre has been situated within the
Post-Internet art movement.[18] He has risen to acclaim with his project Nine Eyes of Google Street View,[19][10][20] which developed a distinctly post-internet approach to photography.[18] His work has been included in numerous prestigious international biennials, including the 58th Venice Biennale,[21] 13th Lyon Biennale,[22] 9th Berlin Biennale,[23] and Manifesta 11.[24]
In 2015, the
City of Montreal and the
Contemporary Art Galleries Association awarded Rafman the Prix-Pierre-Ayot prize for emerging artists.[25] Rafman represented
Quebec twice as a finalist in the competition for the 2015 and 2018
Sobey Art Award.[26][27] In 2018, Parisian fashion house
Balenciaga commissioned Rafman to create an immersive LED tunnel for their Spring-Summer 2019 show.[28][29] Rafman is represented by art galleries
Sprüth Magers (Berlin, Los Angeles, London) and Seventeen (London).[30]
In July 2020, accusations of sexual misconduct were leveled against Rafman on the instagram account @surviving_the_artworld and reported by the Montreal Gazette.[31][32] Jon Rafman successfully sued the Gazette for defamation. The stories were removed from the site, with the newspaper apologizing to the artist for not giving "equal time or space to Mr. Rafman to refute the claims against which he had evidence".[33]At the time, the Hirshhorn Museum suspended a planned Rafman exhibit and his Montreal gallery broke off its relationship with him.[34][35][36]
In February 2022, Jon Rafman's film Punctured Sky (2021) won the KNF (Circle of Dutch Film Journalists) prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).[37]
In January 2023, rapper
Lil Yachty released his critically acclaimed album
Let's Start Here with Rafman's artwork on the cover.[38] In July 2023, Rafman contributed artwork to rapper
Travis Scott's highly anticipated album,
Utopia.[39] In January 2024,
Kanye West posted a trailer to Instagram with the caption "VULTURES TRAILER BY JON RAFMAN" for his upcoming collaborative album with
Ty Dolla Sign,
Vultures.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦'𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾, Sprueth Magers, London, January 2023[citation needed]
Minor Daemon, 180 Strand, London, January 2023 [40]
Counterfit Poast, Sprueth Magers, Berlin, September 2022[citation needed]
Egregores and Grimoires, Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin, September 2022 [41]
Arbiter of Worlds, Ordet, Milan, February 2022 [42]
You, the World, and I, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, October 2021 [43]
Dream Journal, Oval Office, Bochum, September 2021 [44]
Il Viaggiatore Mentale, Palazzina dei Giardini, Modena, September 2018[45]
Jon Rafman, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, Sweden, 2016[46]
I have ten thousand compound eyes and each is named suffering, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, May 2016[47]
Jon Rafman, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, June 2015[48]
Annals of Time Lost, Future Gallery, Berlin, April 2013[49]
A Man Digging, Seventeen Gallery, London, May 2013[50]
Communicating the Archive: Physical Migration.Regional State Archives in Gothenburg. Rafman's work was included, as was an essay by Sandra Rafman, on the archival impulses of Rafman's work.[62]