Originally trained as a painter, American artist Jakob Dwight was drawn to digital software as an opportunity to explore the transformative impact of digital media on painting and the painterly perspective. Inspired by the opiated, meditative quality of the screen-based televisual space, the artist saw the exploration of the illuminated image as significant to contemporary sensory culture. With his abstracted animations, the artist seeks the transformative potential of light and space by employing multiple media including painting, digital photography, collage, and the dome master (circular ‘fisheye’ images produced in the process of making fulldome video).
Based in New York, Washington and Atlanta, Dwight’s work has been presented internationally, including in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Berlin, Atlanta, Vienna, and New York. He has exhibited in Kassel, Germany as part of the Kreuzberg Pavillon at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012. In the same year, he was awarded the Harvestworks New Works residency in New York. In 2010, Dwight was invited to attend GlogauAIR artists' residency in Germany, and in the following year, 2011, he was awarded a United States artist’s residency. As part of the Aesthetics & Therapeutics Lab, a collectively run platform developed to initiate installations and experiments in immersive art and healing, Dwight has installed a multi-sensory environment at Vortex Immersion Media Dome in LA in 2014. He has been commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum to create new work for the Disguise: Masks and Global African Art exhibition at UCLA's Fowler Museum, which travels to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in April 2016.