Jason Shulman
b. 1963, United Kingdom
Jason Shulman is an artist of unparalleled originality. His work, which is sometimes wall-mounted, and other times sculptural or installation-based, examines light, motion, perception and personal experience with elegant sleight of hand and the precision of a forensic scientist. Born in 1963 in London, Shulman attended the London College of Printing from 1982 to 1985. During his studies he developed a striking vernacular born of ceaseless, multi-disciplinary experimentation. Over the ensuing decades, he has established an elusive practice that is grounded in, and fraught with, the splendid and the strange. His work defies conventional categories of genre and style. As he says, ’I just want to make art that I haven’t seen before’.
Optical effects have captivated Shulman since his childhood, which was spent studying free gifts in cereal boxes, lenticular postcards, compendiums of Victorian magic tricks, and magnets. Whilst on holiday in California in 1969 he found himself in a paradise of novelty gifts- the sort that he had previously only seen and coveted in advertisements at the back of imported American comics. Among them were ‘instant life’ pets; glow in the dark paint; and an incredibly lightweight fake boulder, a film prop, rendered in painted polyurethane. These small encounters, each an ideal of surprise and counter-intuition, proved formative to Shulman’s world-view as a mature artist.
The artist’s fascination with cinema is another strong influence that has permeated both life and work. Shulman began collecting 8mm celluloid films as a child, enchanted by the snug fit of projected light on surfaces and by the magical potential to create a moving image from a succession of still fragments.
The son of two journalists, Shulman slid into the world of publishing in the mid 1980s, acting as the Art Director for several prestigious newspapers and magazines. The same design principals that had governed his command of the page- space, line and balance (or wilful imbalance) - oozed into the third dimension upon his pursuit of a largely reclusive artistic practice from the early 2000s.
Finding inspiration in the bargain shops of the East End, Shulman has made prolific use of mass-produced and industrial materials in his work: from postcards to pan scourers, upholstery pins to dollhouse accessories. And yet, the artist’s choice of his material holds no political weight, nor Modernist interest. Rather, it is a purely technical approach born of curiosity and experimentation. Over the course of his career he has tackled several distinct themes with a rigorous and obsessive interest. The martini glass, the Solpadeine tablet and the act of swimming stand as muses through which to explore myriad ideas. Each theme can occupy the artist for many years.
Throughout and beyond his thematic series, Shulman has displayed a preoccupation with light and movement. The artist’s most well-known body of work, Photographs of Film, translates feature films into beguiling colour-fields using long exposure photography. Most recently, Shulman has applied the same technique to a more focused range of footage: recorded historic events, kisses in films, and climatic sequences of male ejaculation.