John Vokoun

Lives and works in Santa Fe, NM, USA

Artist statement

John Vokoun - Artist Statement I believe we can find a life of spirituality in technology, which both connects and disconnects us as it shapes our lives. The technologies we build create points of interconnectivity that could help us become more whole. With a background in color field painting, I use digital tools to explore the effects of the Information Age on society. Influenced by Carl Jung and mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Benoit Mandlebrot, I seek universal patterns between systems. Despite the differences that fragment our world, exacerbated and recapitulated by digital media, we also share modes of communication, symbols, gestures, and geometries, and these could help us understand our evolution in a data saturated–world. Using computer data and geometry, I look to nature for how patterns emerge from chaos. I aspire to work from a meditative space and reconnect with nature’s teachings, which would have a reverberating impact in my quest to reflect the quiet solace that rises from the pool of chaotic data in contemporary life. In a recent series, my laser-cut drawings convey the interaction between hand and computer with forms generated by corrupted computer data. This is part of my continued work reinterpreting data line by line, as if translating from one language to a new abstract linguistic structure. I look for meaning by decomposing information to basic units: data point, pixel, byte, and language, discovering the source and rebuilding into simple forms....

Artwork