HUNTING FOR PHEASANTS

The installation Hunting for Pheasants presents a series of unique posters that commemorate victims—both real and fictional—of political assassination, as well as a single-channel video of re-appropriated video footage. The posters are hand-made pencil drawings based on photographs from newspaper archives and illustrate the work’s engagement with an archival impulse. To navigate the space of the installation and view these posters, the viewer must traverse a maze-like construction of low stainless steel railings painted white, somewhat reminiscent of the roped-off queues that guide airport security lines. The walls on which the posters hang are also painted with vertical bands of color that function as a mechanism of interruption, or artificial boundaries between stories. Hunting for Pheasants originated with an idea of creating advertisement posters for films that don’t exist, films that will never be made. It serves as a form of tribute to the poster as an art form, as a method of mass communication that becomes increasingly anachronistic and obsolete, and then grows in value with the passage of time. Of particular importance to the work is its relationship to the Polish School of Posters of the 1960s and 1970s, less in its particulars and more so as a phenomenon. These posters hardly included images of movie stars, but rather aspired to represent the essence of a film through symbolism and a conceptual approach that cleverly seems to reverse an assumed hierarchy—as if the ‘advertised’ films were made for the sake of posters, not the other way around. This installation is a synthesis of C.T. Jasper’s interest in posters, film, design, history, fiction and politics, but in no particular order or hierarchy. The artist utilizes collage here, not in the literal sense, but rather the collaging of ideas, points of reference, and aspects of form and content so as to give each of these elements an almost equivalent amount of attention. Through these means, Jasper grapples with questions of how news is processed, how today’s news is inevitably doomed to be become yesterday’s news, the propensity to be more easily moved by a film’s illustration of history than the history or historical facts themselves, how fiction and facts are intertwined, how heroic symbols and icons are created, and how one relates to the breakthrough historical moments. When is the moment in time when history becomes fiction and fiction becomes history? And when is the moment when a dramatic political event is absorbed and internalized by an average citizen, becoming part of an individual, unique interpretation?