Jason Salavon
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Work from 100 Special Moments.
“Jason Salavon selects as source material groups of images from popular culture—real-estate listing photographs, Playboy centerfolds, high-school yearbook portraits—and blends them into generalized images characteristic of types existing in everyday life.
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Salavon chose to blend pictures of not-so-average women in his series Every Playboy Centerfold. By fusing 120 centerfolds from each decade in the 1960s – 90s, Salavon created blurred compositions emphasizing predominant characteristics of the typical Playboy model: long hair, light skin, thin body, radiant against a bluish background. Presented as a series, the pictures reveal the thinning, lightening, and increased frontality of the playmates over the years.
All of Salavon’s amalgam series depend on the digital capacity to treat every pixel individually and operate the mathematical formula for averages on miniscule color elements. Yet the technological precision used to produce his pictures is counterbalanced by their hazy, impressionistic form. The final compositions, significantly abstract, reveal cultural generalities as they hint at the glut of information, manipulated and generated by digital mediums, that has become a powerful reality of contemporary life…” – Karen Irvine