KOSSOFF FLEES UKRAINE
digital video/machinima (2160 x 1440), color, sound, 31’ 12”, 2022, Northern Ireland
Created by Jason Rouse
Machinima, landscape painting, first-person shooters, walking simulators, and photogrammetry. Jason Rouse’s new artwork is a triumph of remediation as it incorporates, repurposes, and transforms a variety of media, genres, and aesthetics. It is simultaneously an art history lesson and a meditation on current events delivered via Unity 3D. As the title suggests, this work is about Leon Kossoff (1926–2019), one of the most influential British painters of the XIX century, who was also the son of two Ukrainian refugees fleeing persecution during the 1903-1906 pogrom. Kossoff Flees Ukraine reconstructs that miraculous escape through the forests and mountains of Europe, while updating the narrative to another tragedy, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The outcome is a document about the past that speaks about the contingent moment.
Jason Rouse (b. 1985) is an Irish artist living and working in Cardiff, Wales. In Rouse’s work, digital and traditional arts converge, creating unexpected results. Rouse has painted game landscapes, developed interactive games, and experimented with generative spaces. Rouse has been a finalist with Lumen Prize for Digital Art, exhibited at the inaugural Westmorland Landscape Prize and selected for the 2020 BEEP Painting Prize. He has received a Wales Art International grant for SWITCHed, an exchange program between Arcade Cardiff and Galerie RDV, Nantes. His album of solo Irish traditional music on Uilleann Pipes has won critical acclaim from both press and peers.
