Jack _____
Jack Kerouac described On the Road as “the story of two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God.” Supposedly, he wrote the book over the course of three weeks on a 120-foot scroll of tracing paper. This version of the book is known as The Original Scroll, as it quite literally captures the speed that Kerouac invested into his novel.
Jack _____ is an ongoing drawing project that considers the repercussions of exchanging Kerouac’s scroll for a scroll bar. While Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty use a car to travel across the country, Jack _____ uses a search engine as a vehicle to generate drawings, examining the point where the energy of Kerouac’s aesthetic is replaced by the ennui of a life spent in front of a screen. To find each image, I type “Jack” alongside one or more additional words (Skellington, in the box, etc.) into Google Image Search, select an image from the results and translate it into graphite. Each image in the project is an attempt to give physical dimension to the intangible space of the screen. Jack _____, then, highlights the tension between immaterial data and the physical act of drawing.
The drawings are framed and displayed together on a shelf, where they are arranged in a different configuration each time the work is exhibited. This allows each installation to be encountered as a new composition.
Alongside Jack _____ are related investigations that approach On the Road from different directions. Paradise is a performance in which I made an apple pie from ingredients gathered across the country; Born Again is a video recorded at Walden Pond; and Poem prints words from The House at Pooh Corner onto car magnets, referencing Kerouac’s enigmatic claim that "God is Pooh Bear."
