Jason de Haan: Outer Spaces
Jason de Haan Salt Beard (Mercury) 2010
Jason de Haan is one the young stars of the new Calgary art scene and his Toronto exhibition “Like Dust” offers ample evidence as to why. Ranging across media, but specializing in sculpture and works on paper with collaged appropriated imagery, de Haan constructs a poetry of time and history out of wood, marble, metal, salt crystals and “speculatively haunted” mirrors. The salt, presented front and centre in the new Salt Beard (Mercury) sculpture, is a mineral-growth beard anchored to the jaw of a classical marble bust. In one fell swoop the work grabs onto both timeless classicism and the lost years of Rip Van Winkle, who confronts the new world of his reawakening in a body weighed down by 20 years of decrepit aging. It’s this fascination with adopted oldness and displaced perception that also haunts the sculpture Spirits Looking At Themselves, where facing mirrors are imagined as coming from different, gender-associated places so as to mirror an infinity of difference (location, personal history, vanished faces) in their reflections. A series of collage images in Birth of a New Planet I–IV work with shaped and adorned Hubble Spacecraft images that seem to struggle in their pursuit of a circular, planetary shape. Note that it’s not the gleaming newness of the modern that de Haan is after, but rather the amorphous, troubled newness of the still-unformed—a rich and meaningful territory for a young artist in first years of a new century made almost instantly alert to the burdens of history. (944 Queen St W, Toronto ON)
Jason de Haan Spirits Looking At Themselves 2010
Jason de Haan “Like Dust” 2010 Installation view with Salt Beard (Mercury) 2010 / photo Richard Rhodes
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
