Scorpion Dagger (Canadian, b. 1978) is the alias of James Kerr, a Montreal-based digital artist. He cuts small fragments from Renaissance paintings in the Metropolitan Museum's public-domain archive and reassembles them into animated GIFs of contemporary life. His Renaissance figures vape, rave, and search for pornography online, translating mundane modern rituals into the visual language of the old masters.
Kerr studied political science before turning to art full time. In 2004 he and a group of friends founded the collective Young Peoples Foundation, which staged international exhibitions and published three books. The name Scorpion Dagger began years earlier as a construction-site nickname. In 2012 he revived it for a new project: posting one GIF a day on Tumblr for a year. The first two GIFs were animated from physical collages he photographed, but by the third he turned to digital sources, first the Library of Congress and then the Metropolitan Museum's archive. As he told Hyperallergic, “there could be as many as 20 to 30 paintings collaged together to make one GIF”.
