Jason Simon. Imprint

About

Imprint juxtaposes the strange with the familiar and autobiographical, suggesting both reside in compromised and overlapping media memories. A series of "lobby cards," for example, normally a promotional item for movies, combines Simon's processed analog video frame-grabs with documentation from the field of Creative Dramatics. Simon's mother, Josephine, trained in Creative Dramatics—her practicum doctoral dissertation from 1972 is the source of imagery, text, and imagined titles. Within the gallery, context emerges via contrasting mediums and methods, suggestive sightlines, and the idea of hand-me-down sensations.

As a genre of theater, Creative Dramatics positions itself within utopian pedagogy: through play and story, touch and movement, the body becomes an agent of empathy and democratized self-expression. Simon's video, From Creative Dramatics to Owego, narrated in part by Josephine, rehearses her methodology on-screen. Recorded visits to the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York in the early 2000s, interspersed with processed visuals, nods to Simon’s background in electronic media. Both alternative video and Creative Dramatics exercised a language of liberation that remains contradictory, unresolved. On the gallery's website, a video Simon created in collaboration with his college students activates Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos’ poetry of anarchism, masquerading as a news conference, where projections double as fact.

In the gallery, outdated and outlaw material history intersect. The Gamecock, a magazine devoted to cockfighting, is assembled into a large grid entitled Flag. In the shadow of the birds, arranged into a chorus or citizenry, an ideological tension sprouts from even a whisper of the damned sport, the periodicals only recently banned after a century of national circulation promoting the persistent cruelty. Proceeding from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s sense of deep play—the continual engagement with an impossibly high stakes scenario, ranking status over sustenance—and from Charles Willeford’s pulp-fiction novel, Cockfighter, whose hard-boiled hero operates under a vow of silence, Simon draws attention to American valences.

Rather than define or dismiss, Simon recovers references for recycling and interpretation, perhaps with a dose of wishful thinking. His bricolage sculptures of mannequin, nail salon, and jewelry display hands, each adorned with leather and metal accessories usually reserved for gamecocks, disconnect from the ‘sport’. These works, titled Muffs and Gaffs, are attached to metal shelves at the wrist, suggestive of a recreational purpose or couture. Cockfighting serves as an oscillating frame of reference, at once an anthropomorphic vocabulary of adornment, and allusion to sparring rhetoric. For Imprint, Simon approaches artifact-ambiguity, circulating on eBay among cockfighting connoisseurs or archives of Creative Dramatics, as a contradictory logic of the present.