"Brand New Aura" is curatorial intervention that activates the art database program, Google Art Project (GAP). In April of 2012, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) became the first Canadian museum to participate in GAP. For this exhibition Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman produced a suite of new artworks that have been **loaded to the GAP website and presented alongside artworks from the AGO’s permanent collection. Rafman appropriates artworks from the AGO’s collection; cropping, repeating, stretching, modifying, and then grafting the image onto the surface of an intricate, virtual three-dimensional setting. Rafman’s series, Brand New Paint Job, the collection of artworks at the centre of the exhibition, straddle the line between artistic sacrilege and homage; they are an ironic mash-** of high and low culture, the past and present. Rafman utilizes a viewer’s knowledge of art history to produce something eerily familiar, a brand new artwork distinct from what it imitates.
#Digital #Internet #Rafman #contemporary #mashup #appropriation #BrandNewAura
