Jason Seife has collaborated with developer Andrew Cassetti to create a JavaScript application to transform 11 hand-drawn images into infinite new iterations through mirroring, slicing, reflecting and animating. The exhibition “Generascope”, the artist’s first dedicated solo show in the region, will run at ICD Brookfield Place Arts from March 3rd to April 3rd, 2022.
The exhibition combines the artist’s interest in traditional textiles and embroideries of the MENA region with up-to-date technological tools of the digital art space. Jason Seife’s work is a reference to old Persian carpets, an art form that nowadays is often taken for granted. Carpets were a large part of his childhood growing up with immigrant parents of Middle Eastern descent. Jason recreates these old weavings by carefully painting them on canvas in colours and mediums that were not normally used in their origin.
“Generascope” will comprise several large-scale digital animations, four large-scale painted works on canvas as well as the limited edition prints available online. Together, they complete a digital and analogue unity that reflects this project. For Jason Seife, this process of making and reimagining codes, collaboration and creation embody the relationship between man/machine and digital/analogue.
“When thinking of this project I knew that ICD Brookfield Place, at the heart of Dubai’s International Financial Centre, would be the ideal location for far-reaching public engagement with my art,” said Seife. “My hand-drawn images which underpin these artworks absorb much influence from the codes and traditions of the region—from arabesque to Islamic geometry and carpet designs. Through the scope of this project, I’m able to present these familiar and important contributions to regional visual culture in a way that challenges the viewer to interpret and digest this artwork in an unconventional context while reimagining them in dialogue with new developments in technology.”
