Jason de Haan's Time Capsule
Jason de Haan, "Salt Shroud," 2017
3D polyester printed digital scan and salt, detail courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
Calgary-based artist Jason de Haan is respected across Canada and abroad, and was due for greater recognition at home when the Esker Foundation stepped up with a solo show. Oh for eyes! At night we dream of eyes! gives his multidisciplinary work the space and support it needs and deserves. Curated by Naomi Potter and Shauna Thompson, it’s playful, captivating and, at times, elegiac – a gem of an exhibition that provides an effective framework to grasp why there’s so much buzz around de Haan.
The show, which runs until Aug. 27, is a synthesis of de Haan’s abiding interests. It starts by immersing viewers in a soundscape of gentle vibrations, inviting them to listen, see and feel, as they breathe in de Haan’s art-making process. Moving through the spaces, you might think you are in a science lab or a sci-fi set, a cabinet of curiosities or a gallery of minimal conceptual sculpture. Or all of the above, but with a twist. The art takes various forms – installation, sculpture, photography and collage – but is always rich with associations, fascinating materials and unconventional processes.
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Jason de Haan, "Hope, Love, Peace, Generosity, Purpose, Harmony," 2008
minerals, crystals, car speakers, amplifier, CD player and soundtrack, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
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Jason de Haan, "Hope, Love, Peace, Generosity, Purpose, Harmony," 2008
minerals, crystals, car speakers, amplifier, CD player and soundtrack, detail on installation, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
De Haan first showed Hope, Love, Peace, Generosity, Purpose, Harmony in 2008 at Galerie Sans Nom, an artist-run centre in New Brunswick, as “a gesture of good will” with a characteristic tone of gentle humour. The materials include a teenager’s dream collection of crystals and car speakers, along with cinder blocks and an old sound system. It’s rigged up in a do-it-yourself manner so sound waves oscillate from the highest to lowest frequencies perceptible to the human ear through a circle of the upturned speakers, each piled up with crystals that reverberate at various frequencies. There’s a healthy skepticism about the presumed “healing” properties of crystals, mixed with a dash of “what if?”
The work has been shown in many venues, but at the Esker, de Haan magnifies its effect, using the scale and acoustics of the gallery to full advantage by enlarging the circle with two additional speakers and allowing the hypnotic, ambient drone to infuse the entire gallery.
The core of the crystal collection is de Haan’s personal boyhood trove. Collecting has remained a vital part of his art practice. He often finds objects of interest through travel and chance encounters, relying, he says, on “patience, waiting and surprise.” In 2009, he found a classical-style bronze portrait bust of a woman, and treated it with a super saturated salt solution to grow a crystalline beard. Following this piece, Barba de Sal, he grew mineral-salt beards on a series of stone, plaster and ceramic busts for subsequent exhibitions, including the 2010 Alberta Biennial.
Works like these have garnered de Haan awards and exhibitions across Canada and in Europe and the United States since he graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2006. He got his start with shows at artist-run centres and gained momentum through his travels, including residencies in Banff, the Klondike, the East Kootenays and Norway. In 2015, three years after making the shortlist for the Sobey Art Award, he earned an MFA from Bard College in upstate New York. In 2016, the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award recognized his “poetic and compelling work.”
De Haan often continues his line of thinking, revisiting and reworking notions over the years. For instance, he has encircled branches of trees with gold bands, imagining they will eventually become embedded within the growth rings. He began with 100 trees at Toronto’s Queen’s Park in 2011, then a hawthorn at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge in 2012, and a Japanese flowering cherry at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in 2014. At the Esker, a gold band hangs in the crown of a fig tree.
When he started the salt beard series, de Haan knew he needed to look for pre-existing sculptures that exemplified a range of ways of representing the figure, varying in style or material. This year, he made Salt Shroud, a figure precariously balanced on tiptoe that bears an incipient growth of salt crystals. It is, perhaps, the most ambitious and haunting iteration. Here the found form of figurative sculpture was an online body scan of a woman. Once she was 3D printed life-size in plastic, he used her gracefully twisting nude body as the base for a two-week growth of salt crystals.
Jason de Haan, "Salt Shroud," 2017
3D polyester printed digital scan and salt, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
“In some way it’s probably the most accurate portrait in the whole series,” he says. “But the figure also remains anonymous. Rendered in plastic, it’s a strange kind of ghost, at least in the material sense. It was interesting to me that this figure could be replicated many times over by machine, but there is something quite violent about human form made by machine, something extremely vulnerable.” While Salt Shroud makes a direct reference to the figure, de Haan notes the entire exhibition has a figurative aspect. “Even if the body is not directly represented in the work, our own bodies are being affected by a number of unseen forces.”
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Jason de Haan, "Swallow All The Brains," 2014-ongoing
found fossils, humidifiers, plastic bottles and concrete, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
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Jason de Haan, "Swallow All The Brains," 2014-ongoing
found fossils, humidifiers, plastic bottles and concrete, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
Throughout the exhibition, parallel stories and comparisons can be found, signaling de Haan’s thoughtful process and multi-layered practice. Swallow All the Brains (2015) features ultrasonic humidifiers that are hydrating brachiopod, clam and ammonite fossils, each disintegrating at its own tempo atop a concrete pillar and redistributing particulates into the air. Close by, a conventional humidifier supports a fragile tortoise fossil from the South Dakota Badlands. It finds a poignant echo in another work in the exhibition, a slide show of de Haan’s images of a soft-shelled turtle named Shelly that has lived for more than 15 years in an aquarium at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., surrounded by displays of fossils.
Jason de Haan, "The Loneliest Monk," 2017
plaster, saltwater pearls and salt bricks, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
De Haan sees The Loneliest Monk, a sculpture of a dismembered plaster foot speckled with tiny salt water pearls and set on a stack of Himalayan pink salt bricks, as a portrait of the Syrian hermit saint Symeon the Stylite, who lived for 37 years on a platform atop a pillar near Aleppo some 1,500 years ago. At one point, Symeon treated a leg wound with maggots. When a maggot fell to the ground, a disciple picked it up and found it had become a pearl. “The main reason for thinking about the figure of the hermit is thinking about withdrawal of the body from the temporal, physical world,” says de Haan. “These ideas resonate in a number of works, including the evaporating fossils, perching on top of the pillars of humidifiers.”
Spirits Looking at Themselves, one of the newest works in the exhibition, incubated for eight years after de Haan learned of a “haunted” mirror in a Mexican museum. The notion of the mirror as a potential portal to an unseen world extends his interest in temporality and the body into the fleeting world of reflections. He collected some 10 mirrors with ghostly backstories, setting them into simple metal structures with facing pieces of coloured glass, giving the spirits, if they exist, a space in which to recognize themselves and their condition. At first, the structures resemble minimalist sculpture, arranged like a battalion of bookends, but their histories propose a darker dormitory.
Jason de Haan, "Spirits Looking at Themselves," 2009-ongoing
haunted mirrors, coloured glass and aluminum, installation view, courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery
Underlying all de Haan’s art is a curious logic that is distinctly his own, yet particularly pertinent to the uncertain conditions of the current era. Consider his practice as an accretion of experience, stories and proposals that attempt to fathom the elusive qualities of time, fate and other invisible, and perhaps unnameable, forces.
Esker Foundation
444-1011 9 Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0H7
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