Brand New Aura is curatorial a intervention of the art database program, Google Art Project (GAP). In April of 2012, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) became the first museum in Canada to participate in GAP. For this exhibition Montréal-based artist Jon Rafman produced a suite of new artworks that have been uploaded to the GAP website and presented alongside artworks from the AGO’s permanent collection. Rafman appropriates images from the aforementioned collection; cropping, repeating, stretching, modifying, and then grafting them onto the surface of an intricate, virtual three- dimensional setting. Rafman’s series, Brand New Paint Job, the collection of artworks at the centre of the exhibition, straddle the line between artistic sacrilege and homage; they are an ironic mash-up of high and low culture, the past and present. Rafman utilizes a viewer’s knowledge of art history to produce something eerily familiar, a brand new artwork distinct from what it imitates.

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