This is the tenth in a
series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever
Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will
run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists
in many forms of media.
Sharrod with the toy gun his grandfather gave him / Jason Hanasik / Digital C-Print. 2010 / 20x24 inches
Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?
A: My name is Jason
Hanasik. I am from the Hampton Roads area of Virginia and I currently live in
San Francisco, California.
Q: What medium(s) do you work with?
A: I mainly work with
photography, video, and installation.
Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.), and how
does it contribute to your art?
A: I have an MFA in visual
arts from California College of the Arts and a BFA summa cum laude from the
State University of New York at Purchase. I have served as an adviser in the
graduate program at California College of the Arts and am currently the senior manager
of Digital Brand Communications in the Marketing Department at Gap–North
America.
I include my day job since the role was created for me after I created
Gap Incorporated’s contribution to the international “It Gets Better” campaign.
This video, my first live-action video, not only launched my
commercial/editorial career but also positioned video as a major component in
my artistic practice.
Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait
Competition?
A: When NPG relaunched in
2006, I took a quick trip to DC to check out the museum and completely fell in
love with a series of exhibitions that looked at a single important individual
through the various “portraits” [the “One Life” series] they left behind/sat
for during their lifetime. When I moved to the West Coast in 2007, I lost touch
with the museum as I burrowed into my studies.
My interest and knowledge of the
programming reignited during the run of the exhibition “Hide/Seek,” a show I
was very interested in seeing and luckily did see before it moved to other
venues. Consequently, when a few friends told me about the Outwin Boochever
Portrait Competition, I immediately put the next entry date on my calendar!
Being a part of the lineage of the organization is definitely a dream come
true.
Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.
A: I submitted the video
installation Sharrod (Turn/Twirl).
I began working with
Sharrod, the main protagonist of the piece, at the end of 2008 while I was home
on holiday in my hometown, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. At the time, I
was completing the project “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore” and
was not only hungry for a new project but also very interested in how the
military grooms and sculpts its young recruits. (The idea was a natural
transition from the project I was finishing up.) Sharrod’s mother and my father
were coworkers and friends, and by happenstance, Sharrod was also a freshman at
my alma mater, Salem High School. Most important, he was enrolled in the
military’s high school preparatory program NJROTC, the Navy Junior Reserve
Officers Training Corp.
Sharrod (Turn/Twirl) was created during the winter of 2010.
Earlier that year, Sharrod told me a story about an experience he had at a mock
boot camp. According to Sharrod, the commanding officer made all of the young
recruits stand at attention to be inspected for long periods of time. Sharrod
shared that a few of the young men started losing their balance, and one passed
out because they were locking their knees and stopping the blood flow to their
brain. (I should note that I have always been fascinated by the military salute
and have even tried to re-create the perfect salute myself in my bathroom
mirror.)
I asked Sharrod to
re-create the salute as a durational exercise, but this time my camera would be
the one doing the inspection. After about ten minutes, I was thoroughly bored
and told Sharrod that the idea was a bust and apologized for wasting his time.
As I began breaking down my equipment, Sharrod, holding the salute, turned
slightly and I saw what would become Sharrod
(Turn/Twirl). I set the camera back up, explained my vision and captured
the raw footage that would become Sharrod
(Turn/Twirl).
Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.
A: I’m really interested
in openness, transparency, cycles, and expectations. I’ll leave the latter two,
cycles and expectations, for a later question and will instead focus on how
openness and transparency inform and in some ways guide my inquiry and focus.
When I was a teenager,
my parents sat my sister and me down to tell us a family secret. At that
moment, my family’s narrative split into two—the reality I had been living and
the one in which I was asked to rectify and assimilate. As the years went by, I
began to see ruptures in the various lives all around me, including my own. For
example, friends’ parents were catching spouses in extramarital affairs; I was
hiding my sexuality from my family and some friends; friends/soldiers were
struggling with the deaths of other friends but unable to share publicly
because they thought it was not masculine/honorable, etc.
These schisms between
a secret/private emotional life and a public experience confused me greatly.
When I finished the initial process of coming out, the breach I was seeing in
other lives began to become the focus of my work. This awareness manifests
itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes, I choose to focus on the disconnect
mentioned above, and ask questions about why it is present and what motivating
factors perpetuate the schism between private and public. Other times, I choose
to document and present an unguarded picture of the things I often see hiding
in plain sight.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I am currently working
on a project called "We always thought the walls would protect us, but suddenly
realized they were as weak as our frames." The installation will open at the San
Francisco Arts Commission Gallery as part of a two-person show called
“Conversations 6” in early 2013.
The piece continues my interest in family,
affect, home, loss, collaborating with my subjects, and storytelling but
introduces my recent fascination with theater into the mix. “We always thought
the walls would protect us, but suddenly realized they were as weak as our
frames” is the first in what I imagine will be a series of
projects/manifestations about what I experienced and have been processing since
2010. In 2010, my first long-term relationship ended, my family lost our home
due to consequences stemming from the recession, and my little (and only)
sister died very unexpectedly.
This first project deals mainly with the loss of
my family home; however, as I have been making and writing about the piece, I
realize that there are definitely references to the departure of my boyfriend
and the sudden loss of my sister.
Q: How has your work changed over time?
A: My work has definitely
changed over time. In 2002, I made a portrait of my parents, Jeff and Jackie
Hanasik (below), which basically opened my eyes to not only the power of images but
also clarified for me—and I think my audience—what I was up to in my work. From
the moment I brought that picture into my junior seminar at SUNY–Purchase to
about 2006–7, I was primarily focused on creating medium- to large- format,
somewhat static portraits.
By the time I entered graduate school in 2007, I was
restless and bored with the process, practice, and especially rules of
exhibiting photographs. The photography world had burst open as weblogs
proliferated and the photo world seemed to get bigger. This was awesome but
seemed somehow smaller, as I felt like I was seeing the same types of pictures
over and over again. Video and installation became more interesting to me, as
did nontraditional exhibition formats being explored earlier in the decade by
Wolfgang Tilmans.
While boredom was
definitely a motivating factor, I know now that it was really frustration about
not being able to create experiences that truly transported my viewer into the
spaces, mindsets, and/or questions that I was trying to develop and was curious
about in my work. Over the course of the last five years (and two long-term
projects), my practice is now richer, more diverse, and my intentions and
concepts have become much more nuanced and, I hope, clearer to the viewer.
Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.
A: In the fall of 2009, I
presented my first solo exhibition, “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern
Shore,” in New York City at +Kris Graves Projects. As the opening reception was
winding down, and only a few people were left in the gallery, two women caught
my attention, so I went over and introduced myself. One of the women appeared
to be consoling the other one and I asked if everything was all right. With
tears in her eyes, the woman who was crying looked up at me and said, “Thank
you. My son returned from Iraq a few months ago and well, he just didn’t seem
right and I could not understand. Tonight, after looking at your project, I
think I understand what he is going through. Thank you.” Needless to say, that
interaction has stuck with me ever since.
Q: Who is your favorite artist?
A: Naming just one is
much too difficult, so instead, here are a few: Larry Sultan, Paul Cadmus,
Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Jesper Just, Collier Schorr, Dan Flavin, and Paul
Chan.
Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would
it be?
A: Larry Kramer. He’s
popped up a lot for me in my twenties. I just recently had the chance to see The Normal Heart at American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and thought it was absolutely amazing.
His “portraits” in that play and in the book Faggots are incredible. I have no idea what we’d make together, but
I think the way he uses personal biography as an igniting force for drama,
portraiture, and storytelling is really compelling and in line with my own
interests and practice.
Q: What inspires you?
A: Expectations and
cycles and finding ways to expose these, unravel them and ask questions why we
fall into/accept them in the first place.
Growing up in the
Hampton Roads area of Virginia, I was inundated by narrow views of masculinity
and femininity and the conservative religious right. Although my family
traveled up and down the East Coast a lot as a kid, it was not until I entered
my twenties and moved to New York and then San Francisco that I realized how
much I was beholden to suffocating ideas about gender presentation, sexuality,
and family dynamics.
As my work has matured, I’ve been able to investigate
these earlier experiences, locate them in culture and embark on new projects that
explode them open. Ultimately, I hope to ask questions that motivate viewers to
locate and examine similarly closed perspectives in themselves.

Jeff and Jackie Hanasik / Jason Hanasik, 2002 / Digital C-Print / 20x20 inches
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