Artist Email: jkofke@gmail.com
Artist Website: www.jasonkofke.com
Medium: drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, installation, audio-visual
Artist Statement
Using a practice of salvage ethnography, I utilize the things through which events and meanings are communicated: The projection screen in the classroom, the notebook page in the library, the snap shot at the crime scene, the satellite transmission into the living room, the digitized image archive; these devices and their content fabricate our concept of meaning and progress. So as to discern meaning for my viewers or for myself, my work is a manipulation of these communication media and their symbols. I convey images of grand human ambition and catastrophic failure, vanguard technology and moribund devices. I attempt to show relations between events and products, histories and artifacts, images and meanings. Within my work, I convey notions of Catastrophe Theory – a debunked mathematical study of sudden change. I use a failed theory to objectively understand what I claim are failures of humanity in previous generations: The Nuclear Program, the Cold War, Global Consumerism, Racist Ideologies, Radical Industrialization. I translate these cultural progressions into line-based, scientific illustration style renderings. I exhibit these symbols so as to keep alive their historical relevance and bring greater purpose to choices made in the present. Conscious of the unprecedented forces invented or discovered in the past century, Santayana’s quotation of having to re-live history, should one become ignorant of it, is too ominous a prospect to chance. So as to affect our future century, my use of media as an artist in the early 21st century looks backward in time.