Contemporary Photographer Series - Jason Lazarus

Phase 1 Live Archive, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA © Jason Lazarus

Jason Lazarus (b. 1975) is a Florida-based artist, educator, curator and writer. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Milwaukee Museum of Art and have been shown in galleries and museums around the world. He was recently interviewed by Benjamin Moten for our Contemporary Photographer Series (CPS).

People primarily recognize you as a photographer but you've branched out of that role in the last few years. How has serving as an archivist or curator affected your mission as an artist?

I consider it all my practice - interdependent, generative and my path of growth. As I've gotten older, I don't shoehorn all my thoughts into printed photographs anymore, this seemed limited and anachronistic to me. I'm currently a new tenure-track assistant professor of photography and digital media at the University of South Florida, Tampa and my pet project down here is starting a gallery, Coco Hunday, set to open in the Spring of 2016. I miss curating and will be seeking out artists/work/formats that challenge my ideas about everything. Inevitably this will inform my own practice and the gallery will also act as a pedagogical tool - If my professor is having art shows in his garage, why don't I? You have to make your own art world, and strangely when you do, the more mainstream institutions seem to clamor for it. Michelle Grabner's practice is a good example.

Your project, Phase 1 Live Archive, features Occupy Wall Street signs that have been recreated from online documentation of occupations that have happened around the world. The physical signs that are made are a part of a growing installation. While exhibiting this body of work, you've been able to start a dialogue about the signs used during major protests. How has this experience varied with each different exhibition?

Each geographic location, its context, its people, all inform the workshops and the readings of the work. When I exhibited the work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF, the audience was informed by their activist history and the teenagers I worked with threw themselves into their contributions. In Chicago at the MCA, there seemed to be more of a divide between artists and activists, and the larger audience seemed to operate more as witnesses in general. The workshop I had there was just as productive; if someone shows up at the workshop they are already open-hearted to the process and its meaning.

© Jason Lazarus

During exhibitions of this work, you've held workshops where participants are encouraged to make their own protest signs. In these workshops, is there a discussion about the process of making signs versus the importance of the message displayed on the signs?

There is not a standard curriculum, the pedagogical aspect is very much embodied, and through participation, the connections and repercussions seem to flourish. This is my attempt at circumnavigating the traditional documentary on a social phenomenon - let's make the project together and be together, let's mimic the economy of protect for a public forum.

Installation detail, Too Hard To Keep © Jason Lazarus

Collaboration and submissions have helped assist you in adding to many of your exhibitions in the last few years. One of your projects, Too Hard To Keep, features old personal photographs that were too emotionally painful for their original owners to keep. The owners weren't required to provide a reason or explanation as to why they couldn't keep the photo when they submitted them. Without having this prior context, how were you able to curate the exhibitions?

I curate through a sensibility that grows with the project - how can I show the texture and depth of the submissions? How can I not bore the viewer or give them what they expect? How can I slow down the reading and promote deep engagement? How can the selections and installation strategies encourage personal connection and broader philosophical engagement with images, archives, history-writing, and the analog-to-digital paradigm shift?

© Jason Lazarus

Phase 1 Live Archive and Too Hard to Keep are both ongoing projects. As an artist, when do you decide a project is complete?

When I am done learning, things tend to slow down, although both projects seem to resuscitate themselves which is motivating to take another step into their iterative pathways.