Everywhere Ghostly is Nowhere Bodily, a collection of works by Jason de Haan currently on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, relies on the portentous weight of material or “stored energy” encountered not only in the relic, but in the longevity of a cultivated mythos. The artist’s crystal-bearded heads, having appeared in other contexts, materialize here as more detached and unearthed than their previously exalted personages upon scaffold-like stilts. The larger of the heads appears marooned and laid bare as in a mausoleum, suggesting such solemn reverence be adopted in relation to other works with more levity, such as a stack of posters depicting the photonegative of a comic, mannequin-stiff, bearded figure of vaguely hermit/prophet status. 
Jason de Haan, Chorus (detail), embossing on paper, 2014
A series of embossed details from gravestones spell out “petrify me” in letters made almost invisible by the wrinkled and creased paper. Indicating other zones of frozen life as temporary, symbolic resting spots, tiny dark fingers carved out of meteors are almost swallowed by a white expanse of wall. The exhibition’s premise suggests a willingness to be suspended by “unknowingness”, which de Haan partly likens to a simultaneously forming and evaporating state temporarily anchored by materiality (a process illustrated by a nearby piece in which fossils, affected by the emissions of a humidifier, portend to breathe). The buried or barely discernible histories of the found or made qualities of his work ground these more vaporous conceptual associations.
Unfortunately, de Haan ends up performing a battle of wills with the gallery itself. The simultaneously cramped and hulking nature of the space (the smaller of the KWAG’s exhibition spaces) does its best to both oppress and dominate the presence of his installation. The work, which relies on both brief engagement and prolonged consideration, retreats even further into itself in this atmosphere of conflict. Rather than nourish a space to engage with de Haan’s “remains of the body and of ideas”, the exhibition’s careful iteration of gestures becomes awkward and drained of life.
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery: http://www.kwag.ca/en/exhibitions/JasondeHaan.asp
Jason de Haan: Everywhere Ghostly is Nowhere Bodily continues to January 4.
Kim Neudorf is an artist and writer currently living in London, Ontario. Her paintings have shown widely in Alberta and at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto. She has contributed writing most recently to Susan Hobbs Gallery, Cooper Cole Gallery, Forest City Gallery, and Evans Contemporary Gallery. She is Akimbo's London correspondent and can be followed @KimNeudorf on Twitter.
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Jason de Haan at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
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