Jason Hirata
Splash
July 31st–August 24th
The posters on view at Veronica are made by a formula, which Levi Easterbrooks and Lucas Quigley helped me to devise and design. When I take part in an exhibition, we overlay the show's textual information onto a cropped vertical image which depicts the show's locale. This image comes from a postcard, which is usually procured with some help and consultation from the organizers presenting the exhibition. Each time the work is shown, it grows in number by adding a poster for the instance in which it is being shown. With Veronica's, there are five posters. Later this year, a sixth poster will be added featuring a pigeon looking down on New York City from a skyscraper.
– Jason Hirata
Five posters – of how many that will eventually be? We’re glimpsing, here, something at its onset: a proposition with no fixed ending. In the day-to-day of life, there’s an impulse to think of “our times” as a hazy infinitude – you are you, your friends are your friends, and we are around, each doing our thing; barring changes in circumstance, that will continue to be – and persist even as circumstances do change and infinitude grows into something definite. We might assume similarly about an “indefinite” project: since the past year yielded five posters, one might project a steady future output at about this pace, the entries piling up with the years, as the CV accumulates.
That very well might prove to be true! Or maybe the endeavor will slow, or change, or drop off, as so many do, for so many reasons, both dramatic and tame. Perhaps it will then resurface. Perhaps it won’t.
One thing I appreciate about Jason is how he pays attention to modest, daily things, and appreciates just how trippy and nefarious they can be. He has a way with the small gesture, and the non-gesture, which reminds me that living is not made up of momentous punctuations in an otherwise blank timeline, as statesmen and historians have often imagined. Rather, it’s built up by countless unassuming moments, as small as making the bed, or changing a lightbulb, or feeding yourself, or just zoning out. Call me corny, but I’ve found that noticing this about him helps shake me from my own big-picture fatalist nightmares, and reminds me that there’s some merit behind the aphorism “Be Here Now”: every moment can be of interest.
Postcards often track our Now, in both grand and personal scope: "Here is this icon, shrunken down to a thousand tiny prints, and this one has been specially sent out by a friend, just for you." With help from Levi and Lucas, Jason routes these levels into each other, making a two-way street between the personal and the historical, layering his specifics over the shape of our shared world, and manifesting this through a formally detached template. It’s crucial, I think, that they're doing so with such efficiency of means: the posters can be a “formula” because there is so much else to do with our time.
– Nick Irvin
