#exhibition work

V: So, what from the initial joke inspired you for this work?  Jack: Outside of the murder and the dead body? I think it would have to be the casual, blunt absurdity of the joke. I found it quite compelling. V: How do you think you incorporated that into your work?  Jack: It feels silly, but when I started thinking about a casual sort of absurdity, I kept circling back to dumb meme’s and jokes you find online. There are pictures out there of really strange places, and someone posed the question of “oh, well what if we kissed at..?” say, the Brutalist McDonald’s Play Place..? Or on the Jouch..? And so on as people kept finding more absurd places and imagining more outlandish scenarios. But I thought, well, what if we (amorphous) did kiss in that absurd place? And what if we passionately answered the question and all that we left behind were fragments of the circumstances that led us there? So, I thought it would be interesting to put my brave little cowboy, James —a reckless little character I’ve used in past works to explore themes of nostalgia with— through a bizarre and fatal happenstance (much like the original joke), and leave it to the viewer to wonder how on earth he ended up there. V: Would you say that’s your intention for the audience?  Jack: Yes, definitely. I want my viewers to look at these pieces I’ve left behind, let them take the rains, and start imagining wild scenarios of what happened. I want them to have lots of fun with it —I’m explicitly asking them if they’d want to make-out on a kiddie ride for christ’s sake— but I still want the viewer to question what brought James to this point in time. To think and ask about what kind of childish joy (or mid-life crisis) (or mad stroke of genius) James would have needed to have, for him to confidently carry through with something as inherently stupid as kissing on a kids pony ride.