Jason Seife creates ornate paintings and installations in which he reinterprets the geometric motifs of traditional Persian rugs. Informed by his Syrian and Cuban heritage, Seife began painting imagery of carpets in acrylic and ink in 2016 and has since developed his hybrid style. In 2018, he presented his large-scale installation Nucleus at the Sharjah Art Museum, a large-scale painting suspended from the ceiling. Seife later began to use concrete as a painting surface, leaving the raw mortar—which he mixes himself—exposed to the elements in some areas to evoke a feeling of wear and age. His works draw on Iran’s varied regional weaving styles as well as Seife’s childhood memories of growing up in rooms covered in carpets. Seife’s influences span the realms of art, architecture, performance and music. In 2021, Seife entered the world of crypto art and began to sell non-fungible tokens of his works.
At the nexus of the contemporary and the historic, the global and the culturally specific, Seife’s exhibition brings together his long-standing interest in traditional textiles and embroideries of the MENA region with cutting-edge technological tools of the digital art space. For “Generascope,” Seife has collaborated with developer Andrew Cassetti to create a JavaScript application whose algorithmic code transforms 11 hand-drawn seed images into infinite new iterations through mirroring, slicing, reflecting and animating.
Inspired from childhood by the intricate iconography of the carpets in his Miami home, Jason Seife has since traveled extensively throughout the region, meeting the weavers of various textile traditions and returning to his studio to at once meticulously recreate the rich colors and symbols while incorporating contemporary and digitally-informed materials, formats, and tools.