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. This project examines 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 a drawing. 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.
Alongside Jack _____ is a collection of works that extend the project through a series of related investigations. 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 pulls words from The House at Pooh Corner and prints them on car magnets.