jason wright: visions of a drive-through warrior

My friend Jason, the man behind the brilliant little online art gallery known as Swipple, is going to be having a show of his own work beginning this week in Ann Arbor. The opening reception for the show, entitled “Visions of the Drive-Through Warrior (A Collaboration),” will be this Friday, January 23, at the University of Michigan’s Residential College Art Gallery, between 5:00 and 7:00 PM. (The show itself will remain up until February 13.) Following are 5 questions that I recently put to Jason, and his answers.

You once told me that a record for a band you were in sold on Ebay for something like $900, didn’t you?

I don’t know how else you would have found that out. It is a rather obscure fact.

Did you just tell me that to hurt me?

No harm was intended, nor was I bragging, at least not in the usual sense, such as: how cool is this? More like: how uncool is this? The music on the record wasn’t even mine (it was my friend Greg’s) and a big part of my role in the band was simply to appear in what may be one of the dorkiest album photos ever. And of course it just so happened that not long before I had dumped the 500 or so remaining copies of the record, even though I had heard some rumblings about European collectors looking for it… In general, this is the kind of occurrence I associate with my personal motto: a day late, a dollar short.

So, what’s the idea behind this new show? What were you thinking about when you put it together?

I based the show in part on a submission I received to the Swipple website a while back, a few pages of text that arrived in the mail somewhat anonymously. The only identification they came with was “Watch Me Swim, Watch Me Float, a story by Frank Dixon,” (no return address or explanation). I didn’t think that much about it at first, I occasionally get weird crap in the mail, but when I started working on this show, I found that images from the text were resonating with me, so I decided to use it as source material for the show.

Using things that I happen to have on hand as a way to make art is something that I do, and so this “story” fit in with the plans I already had for the show. The general idea was that everything in the exhibit would be made from stuff I had sitting around in my garage, mostly old scraps of recycled artwork, but also some other junk as well. And it was also limited to what I could fit into one load in the back of my (small) pickup. You might connect this approach with the concept of “make-do”