Jason de Haan
"Jason de Haan" by Mark Clintberg, Summer 2010, p. 108
Glittering, seductive and mystical: crystals and mirrors are the loci of Jason de Haan’s remarkably focused freshman exhibition with Toronto’s Clint Roenisch. Salt beard (Mercury) is a bizarrely comical bust whose face is crusted with salt in the shape of a mighty beard. This roguish intervention suggests that forms usually under the protection of museums of antiquity are actually impermanent and mutable, objets trouvés to be altered and collaged.
De Haan’s Untitled cube (mirror box containing the Northern Lights), a matte-grey box held together by metallic tape and set on a wooden plinth, refuses to offer a reflection; it is made of reversed mirrors, their reflective surfaces facing inward. Instead, this cube contains the aurora borealis. How this phenomenon has been captured is left to the audience’s imagination. This artwork accomplishes something rare: the object will not allow any figure to enter its field and in fact creates a space that contradicts the principle of the mirror, presuming that mirrors are made first to reflect the human figure.
The artist’s materials are aesthetically powerful, and in other hands might have resulted in facile poetics. The mirror is a symbol and material to be used with care—one easily thrown around (sometimes literally) by disenfranchised art students determined to loosely address notions of the body, representation, ethnicity and so on. The mirror is an easy metaphor and a magical transducer that reflects but does not hold an image, managing to absorb and hold captive the viewer for only a flash. This exhibition, titled “Like Dust,” goes well beyond these elementary dynamics.
Spirits looking at themselves is a sculpture comprising two mirrors that face one another, made free-standing by oak struts. De Haan promises us that the mirrors are haunted, meaning that their inhabitant spectres are locked in eternal mutual contemplation. Precisely cut selenite crystals serve as finger-length pillars between a roof and floor of mirror in the work Untitled (bridge), creating a limitless chasm that extends through the mirrors and seemingly infinitely into the floor. While the impossible space the piece opens up is beautiful—and easy to produce—it is the fragility of the object situation that makes the work singular. The gap that these mirrors pry open is at constant risk of collapse. Because the mirrors are enchanted, as the title card evasively reveals, a delicate supernatural portal threatens to crash closed.
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