Jon Kuzmich is a painter, photographer and 2011 MFA graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Holy meticulous! Jon Kuzmich must have a lot of patience in order to produce these minutely detailed artworks. Painstakingly working dot-by-dot, scan-by-scan, or pixel-by-pixel, Kuzmich strives to reveal the distortion of our self-made belief systems (i.e. religion, science, capitalism) through complex coding, grids and patterning.
The first two works shown (Blue and Green, 2010; The Complete History of Capitalism, 2010) map a series of alternating, hand painted acrylic dots which Kuzmich applied with a needle. The Complete History of Capitalism, which is 56×56 inches, is amazingly comprised of 546,848 separate dots and took approximately 600 hours to create. The final work shown above (images #14-15), entitled Genesis, is actually part of a larger religion-based series called Logos, 2011.
In Logos, Kuzmich translates “every character in the 66 books of the King James Bible into a field of gold, silver, copper, pearl and bronze acrylic dots on square slabs of PVC. Each book of the Bible is then transcribed onto its own PVC slab that is sized according to the number of characters in each specific book. Additionally, the color assignment for each consonant, vowel, space, symbol and number is unique per book in order to create a subtle value gradient over the course of “writing” the entire Bible; with the first book (Genesis) having the lightest density culminating with the last book (Revelations) having the darkest color density.” Quite the undertaking!
Accompanying Logos under Kuzmich’s ‘religious’ umbrella is the following mesmerizing video called Ethos, 2011 – DO WATCH IT! In Ethos, Kuzmich arranged the bible passage “…Forever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven” in an hour-glass structure which he then printed on a single piece of paper. That original print was then Xeroxed to produce a first copy – then that copy was Xeroxed again to produce a second copy. This process of copying the copied was repeated 2,981 times. At the end, all the copies were scanned in the order they were copied and turned into the following digital animation:
Pretty cool, eh?
