Jason Varone & Twitter Serendipities

Jason Varone, The Long & Continuous Emergency. This digital print is a film still mounted to plexiglass.

This week on Art With Your Own Eyes I am exhibiting the videos of artist Jason Varone. So much of my movements and discoveries these days are orchestrated by the mysterious movements of social media.  Often a Tweet that pops up from Tweetdeck while I am working will catch my attention and the next thing I know, my itinerary is set, or re-set, for the day. I pay close attention to repetition; i.e., multiple intersections of my awareness with the same person, place or thing. It might be something or someone I see once mentioned in a blog post or news item.  Then a conversation while I’m in the field may refer to the same artist, event or space. A few days later I see a Tweet and I start to pay attention!

Such is the elaborate case for my discovery of Jason Varone’s work. I’ll start in the middle, because I didn’t discover the beginning of the chain of events until the end.

While working at home on Saturday, I saw a Tweet from LaunchPad announcing an art exhibition opening that afternoon. I had no set plans until later in the evening, so I decided to get dressed and walk over. Launch Pad is a true treasure in my neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It is a creative gathering place focused on the arts, community programs, technology, and anything else that captures the imagination.

At about 3pm I arrived at Launch Pad for Price Check: NYC, an interactive curatorial examination of the variations of the visual art market based upon geographic proximity to a major art center. As is now my custom, I “checked-in” on Foursquare and shared live Tweets from the scene with my Twitter Followers.

This Tweet caught the attention of the artist, who I guess has a search set up for his name because he was not a Follower of mine, nor I his. Not exactly…(more on that in a moment). Jason Re-Tweeted that Tweet this morning at which time I was thrilled to find the artist connected to the work on Twitter. The name, @varonearts, was so so familiar… Turns out Jason Follow each other through the Lush Life LES Twitter account that I Tweet for, so I had seen his Tweets before!

I know I’ve totally lost some of you…

Anyway, to wrap up, I looked at Jason’s website which led me to his Vimeo channel and voila – major discovery! It also impressed me that independent curator Olympia Lambert has this to say on Saturday in response to my Tweet of Jason’s work at Price Check: wow. Stunning work!

Of course, we have since connected on Facebook where it turns out we have my friends Man Bartlett and Alice Walker in common.

It has been a pleasure to watch Jason’s videos and select five of my favorites for you to enjoy all this week!

19 Jul This entry was published on July 19, 2010 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Art With Your Own Eyes, Jason Varone, LaunchPad. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.