Ido Radon

Lives and works in Portland, OR

Artist statement

One way to think about my work is as an attempt to contend with the unrepresentability of the abstractions that shape contemporary life. Of course these same abstractions overdetermine individual expression, and thus I have to understand what I'm doing as an absurd attempt to make material, and thus thinkable, the forces of history. I have long thought about the aesthetics and ethics of engineering: the ways humans shape technologies and the built environment and the ways engineering shapes society. Recently much of my research has been focusing on cultural inflection points or historical forks in 20th century California. My home state captures the constellation of my concerns as social imaginary and locus of subcultural and technological innovation, as laboratory for “new thought” and experiments in living, refuge for Frankfurt School theorists, engine of the cultural fantasy machine, ground zero of our techno-dystopian present.

Artwork