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”.
In 2016 he published the book Do You Like Relaxing?, a crowdfunded project with an augmented-reality component released through the publisher Anteism. He has collaborated with Gucci, Adult Swim, and The New York Times, and animated a Jim Jarmusch documentary about Iggy and the Stooges.He entered the crypto art scene in March 2021, minting his first work, EDM Everywhere, on Zora.,His piece Godzilla was added to the Fakewhale Vault, followed by The Pond and Dumpster Fire as part of Tezos Posse on Nifty Gateway in December 2022.In 2024 his work Night Chips was previewed as part of Fakewhale's ART MARKET debut on Foundation.
