My plan is to post on my blog every time I complete a new image, which should be about once a week.  Sometimes I may post other things as I’m thinking of them as well.  The image I completed this week, and put in the Current Work section of my Portfolio at www.jasonhunterfineart.com is calledTechnical Exercise No. 6: Framing the Subject.  
 
This image is a continuation of some other work I have done with regards to technical exercises and other art-related activities.  In this case, I have hands (in gloves, of course) framing a potential subject. Sometimes when artists are trying to determine what part of the scene they will draw or paint (from life) they will use their hands to make a frame and choose what will be in the composition.   When I am teaching 1st year college students to draw, I will often suggest they do this before they start drawing. 
 
The joke in this image is that I am actually framing my phone…where I have displayed an image of a lighthouse that I presumably found on the internet (don’t worry, I didn’t break copyright, its actually my photograph of the iconic lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove). In any case, it’s a bit of a riff on our reliance, or even dependence, on the internet.  As an artist, I am particularly interested in the way the internet affects the creation of art, which I tend to look at through the lens of theories related to simulacra (see Jean Baudrillard, and others, mentioned previously).  
 
But why rubber gloves, again? I have discussed my interest in them below and that stuff figures in here too—do you have any idea how dirty phones are?  Furthermore, I find their folds and semi-transparency interesting from a formal perspective as well.  But semi-transparency is also fascinating for other reasons…the idea of partially hiding something, or failing to hide it.  In fact, the very first rubber glove image I made was during my MFA and it depicted me wearing rubber gloves to stuff a piñata.  My supervisor suggested that perhaps I should try to hide my identity in the image and so I put a transparent question mark over my face, and failed to do so (he liked that even better). So, gloves are part of the way we try to distance ourselves from our actions and identity (no finger prints…), which is fascinating. Also, they are topical—but don’t worry, I promise I won’t do mask images…hmm, I might not be able to back up that promise.

For my first Blog post I am simply going to write a little bit about what is already up on the web site...in the future I will probably write about the things I am working on, or just posted. Since it’s a lot to cover I will keep it brief or at least brief for me (I am a professor...). So, image by image (starting from the most recent and working back) here is some explanation:

The Ruy Latex Opening 
A great deal of my work has centred around games, play, and humour.  This image is a good example.  Its a play on the most important thing in chess...you need to protect your pieces.  Normally this is done by maintaining communication between them, but I suppose if you were afraid they were covered in germs you would need to use gloves to protect them instead?  The image started with a fairly classical looking photograph of a chess set (played with the Ruy Lopez opening and some common follow up moves...which I will leave to the chess enthusiasts to discover). Then I added the gloves on top of the pieces and made the photo. In photoshop I inserted the digital drawings of gloves to further confound the image and create a claustrophobic feeling around the central subject (the pawn).  Maybe it's an analogy for how one feels when experiencing anxiety about germs, or what have you. Sometimes I ask myself, "did I go too far".  Often that's when I know the image is done. The use of the border here is common in a lot of my work. For me the borders are an analogy to the rules of the game. They define our options but we also can manipulate them, and sometimes that’s the best part.

The War Against Inside/Outside: A Documentary
First of all, its not a documentary.  But I felt a bit like I was making a documentary as I walked around shooting images of doors downtown.   I actually did shoot a documentary of doors as a student many years ago (I wonder if I still have those slides...).  This image is another one featuring the use of rubber gloves (which I will talk about more when I get to, "Name Your Poison" below).  At first the idea was just about going overboard...what if, instead of just wiping down your door handles to clean them, you felt the need to bathe them entirely--or even wash the entire door.  Right now, with COVID, peoples’ concern for sanitization seems to have peaked...and shopping carts, hands, doors, and more are all part of it.  Furthermore, a lot of this centres around being inside or outside. When you go from being outside to inside, or vice versa, that's when different expectations about sanitation, social distancing, and PPE kick in (what's the first thing you do after you enter the grocery store...).  I don't often make art that so connected to such a specific current event...but here is the sad thing:  I had the idea for this image way before COVID. This project gave me some ideas for more door pictures...centred on the concept of the inside/outside duality...coming soon. In the meantime, I now plan on telling people that one of my main claims to fame as a photographer was that I created a documentary of The Doors.

Chess Portraits/Waterscapes
These images started with the idea of simply making heroic portraits of chess pieces. They include a mix of photographic sources and painting. The use of a wet-in-wet paint technique also seemed to go with the idea of including photographs of water in various states.  Mixing traditional handmade art with photography is a more recent interest of mine. Chess fascinates me as a game because it's so serious.  Not a lot of smiling or talking seems to go on in a game of chess. Play and fun can be serious.  Have you ever watched kids play? They take it pretty seriously. On the other hand, water probably should be taken seriously.  If you don't drink it you will die in a matter of days.  But how often do those of us with an abundance of it think about that?  A lot of our thoughts about water centre on fun...vacations, beautiful scenery, swimming at the beach, water balloon fights, a relaxing shower, etc.  Serious vs. playful is a duality and I like it when dualities prove themselves to be indeterminate. I also like the simple shapes of chess pieces that can stand in for people and thus have the potential to make playful commentary. That’s why for this series each image has a name that relates to the definition of the person with the same title, followed by the text: "60% water."  That’s what goggle told me is the percentage of water in a person.  The only exception is the rook, which in English is usually defined as a bird, a con, or a chess piece.  Apparently, it comes from older languages where it meant a castle or tower.
 
The Mr. Clean Gambit
This image once again plays on the idea of cleanliness.  It’s a topic I have been interested in for a while, so much so that my Mother in Law bought me a book called, “The Dirt on Clean”. It is a good read…I recommend it. Here we have chess pieces being bathed in cleaning liquid…after all, they must be covered in germs!  However, the anxiety driven, and overly-serious fear of germs, is counterbalanced with the playful splashing of the liquid. This makes the whole thing seem much more festive than you would expect from such an OCD related activity as washing chess pieces. This image actually came from my decision to try out some new flash units, and I figured what better way to do so than to photograph some splashes.  The rest was a matter of looking through hundreds of shots to find the ones that seemed interesting…and giving them titles with the word “clean” in them.  My favorite is the one of the King and Queen next to each other in what appears to be a bubble bath and the title is, “Good Clean Fun”.  I also hand wrote the titles before photographing them and putting them in the image.  This relates to my interest in combining photographic elements with hand drawn and digitally drawn elements. I want to play with the dichotomy between one of a kind handmade art that has the “artists touch” as compared to infinitely reproducible digital art. 
 
The Flip Side
This image is actually mostly a pencil drawing.  I created a pencil drawing in which I painstakingly used perspective to get the pieces correct in size in relation to one another.   I shaded the pieces and created other “art marks’ here and there in the various squares.  I even printed out the text, collaged it into the drawing and drew on top of it.  The coin in the top corner is also a printout, glued onto the image and drawn upon. Once this was done the whole thing was rephotographed in six parts and stitched together so that the file would have a high resolution.  I then digitally manipulated the images in several ways...adding digital drawing here and there, erasing parts, adjusting lightness and darkness, and even adding some very transparent images into some of the squares. Of all my images where I mix handmade art with digital art, this one is the most on the handmade side of things. The great thing about doing this is you can make an image that could not be created using all handmade or all digital media.  Ironically, that means that, even though it’s a digital file in the end, it is in many ways one of a kind. That’s how the duality is compromised.  This image is all about dualities.  A coin is a thing that has two sides—it can be seen as one or the other. The words in the image suggest things like common, ordinary, or dull. The suggestion is that there is a flip side (or obverse) which means things, people, ideas, places, etc. are not necessarily one or the other…they can change for many reasons…or be both at the same time--like a coin.
 
Technical Exercise Number 4
This image started as a maquette with a chess board background, some tape with words on it, a thumb tack, and a print out of one of my favorite artist’s self-portrait.  However, as I worked on it, I made many changes and, in the end, I decided instead to include my own self portrait, complete with pseudo-humorous scribblings around it. I also added a heavily manipulated digital image of a Pawn as well as a handmade orthographic drawing of a Pawn.  I played around with this image for a long time, and there are many iterations of it.  In the end, I decided to also include instructional text about art-related ideas in some of the squares. A lot of the stuff in the image is about art making and techniques such as drawing, maquettes, a sketch book page, the grid, self-portraiture, etc.  As a professor, I began relating the image to some kind of out of the ordinary technical exercise, because I played around with it for so long.  The thing I love about calling something a technical exercise (or a work in progress) is that it makes the creator immune to criticism! In the face of a negative critique he/she can simply say…well it’s just a technical exercise (or work in progress) and all errors are forgiven.  I just find this phenomenon amusing.
 
Name Your Poison
I did mention earlier that I have been making images with rubber gloves in them for a long time—this was actually the last of them, until recently. It was proceeded by a number of simple high key photographs of my hand touching stuff with rubber gloves.  The idea was simple. Rubber gloves have a number of discomforting connotations; so, if you use them to touch things not normally requiring handing with rubber gloves, these connotations get brought into the communication and the meanings become cross threaded. Name Your Poison went a little further by including not only the object being touched (the hot dog), but also hand sanitizer being put onto the hot dog. Furthermore, in the background there is a line-up of hand sanitizer bottles as if this was an out-of-bounds commercial of some kind. There is also a space above and below with disgusting globs of hand sanitizer squirted decoratively across the still life table. The idea here is the choice: Hot dogs or hand sanitizer.  Which poison do you want?  Actually, I like to eat hotdogs and I sometimes use hand sanitizer…but I would not eat sanitizer and clean myself with hot dogs. There is so much out there that is bad for you that you really do need/get to name your poison.
 
575 Number One
Many years ago, for a short time, I decided that when I saw something photographic, instead of thinking about how I would make a photo of it, I would write a Haiku. The numbers 575 in the title relate to the number of syllables in each line of a Haiku.  This image was inspired by a Haiku I wrote while having lunch with a couple of colleagues. The next step was to put each line of the Haiku into google and see what came up as the first search result.  I then visited those three pages to come up with ideas for subject matter.  Then it was a just a matter of finding/assembling the subject matter and combining it all digitally.  This related to a project I did in my MFA called, “The Internet Drawing Machine,” which was based on making images whose subjects were culled from the top items found in the history of various public computers.  I sometimes like the idea of absolving myself of the responsibility for the image (see above, regarding technical exercises and works in progress). Why go to all the work of thinking up stuff when the internet is there to do it for you? Can you tell if I am being serious when I say that? I can’t.  But it’s interesting. I also like the idea of misusing a Haiku.  We tend to think it’s just a matter of counting syllables, but that’s the sort of slippery misappropriation that is now so commonplace. Deep down we may know that a Haiku is probably more than just counting syllables.  Like most things that are worthwhile it takes time and effort to master the art of making them. Of course, you won’t get any of this from looking at the image.  That’s kind of the point.
 
Strange Things Are Afoot In My Rumpus Room
The title comes from Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure, when Ted (Keanu Reeves) said, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K” after the time machine/telephone booth arrived.  Sometimes I notice that a lot of what I say in the course of speaking to people relates to dialogue from movies and TV, just like this. This image is about living in a world where so much of our thought comes from inside the simulation. For anyone reading this with a background in theory you probably now know that one of my favorite theorists is Jean Baudrillard.  For others, I recommend reading his work…but be warned, it’s pretty thick and takes some time to digest. In this image, I have photographed myself wearing my Brian Mulroney caricature mask, and trapped in a TV.  This mask was a wonderful piece of kitsch that featured in a lot of my older work (especially when I made videos).  When shown, this image was accompanied by a straight-forward low-key portrait of the mask, of which I had several versions. The image transforms into a digital drawing towards the bottom and includes a shadow projected on the wall. Its me behind the mask, me in the TV, and me projected in the shadow. The implication is that media traps us and redefines us as kitsch, changing how we talk, what we think about, what we aspire to, and more…perhaps leaving behind only a shadow.  Have I over stated this?  Of course. To be honest, “I’m not too worried about it.” …that was Kruger’s (Daniel Von Bargen) catch phrase in the TV show, Seinfeld. All I know is: Strange things are afoot in our rumpus rooms (Rumpus Room, that’s a funny word).