Foot_Proposal_Document_Smaller

Foot (working title) / Abstract
Jason de Haan / September 25, 2015
This document imagines the installation of a massive stone foot on a remote
Canadian maritime beach. Measuring approximately 25 feet long, this
fragment of monumental statuary would begin as a 3-dimensional scan and
could be constructed from solid cast concrete or industrially carved marble,
depending on an eventual schedule, scale, location and budget. Further
technical and logistical factors would be determined in close consultation
with a number of qualified engineers, environmentalists, conservationists and
construction specialists.
A lonely beach, characterized by harsh seasons, dramatic tides and variable
climate is the ideal site for this disembodied megalith. The foot faces the
unrelenting ocean: a remnant of an imagined full-figure, confronting the
watery expanse. It is not easily come upon, this lone occupant of a bleak and

isolated landscape. By night starlight will illuminate it’s smooth form and
distinguish it from eroded, lichen-blanketed rocks. The foot may be the
sole witness to passing icebergs, a group of campers may light a bonfire atop
the blasted stump, it may eventually sink beneath a stone beach, swallowed
whole by the Earth.
Simultaneously monumental and ephemeral the work functions as an open
proposition, allowing for a number of possibilities to unfold. Materially
vulnerable, this project is conceived with environmental forces and state of
flux in mind; over time it will shift, discolor, fragment, sink, crack, crust over
with salt, bleach, blacken and char.
My ongoing work strives to recognize the latent possibilities in various
systems, materials and sets of conditions and seeks the spaces where the
invisible and residual reveal their contingencies. This includes propositions
regarding time, monument, architectural space and potentiality. Past
projects include Hope, Love, Peace, Generosity, Purpose, Harmony, a
work exploring the healing and potentially transformative qualities of
over one hundred crystal specimens. A recent video work, a collaboration
with Miruna Dragan, took the form of a video installation in which a fire
tower lookout transforms his tower’s cabin into the resonating chamber
of a homemade cello—broadcasting his music into the vast, unpopulated
landscape. Another of my works takes the form of a gold ring fixed around
the appendages of living trees. One version, 100 Ages, entailed the placement
of 100 individual gold rings onto one 100 individual living trees in Queen’s
Garden Park. Like a band that grows snug upon a slowly swelling finger each
ring will effect, and be affected by, the trees continual growth. The eventual
results are unpredictable and may take years
to be revealed.
Most recently I have produced a series in which a range of fossilized shells
(Clam, Snail, Brachiopod, Ammonite, Turtle, Tortoise) perch, sphinxlike,
on the individual vapor spouts of a wide range of commercially available
humidifiers. In each array cool mist caresses the form of the fossil(s) and,

through assisted erosion, disperses ancient mineral particles of the once-living
form into, and beyond, the exhibition space. A new atmosphere is generated
in which these particles can be inhaled and carried away in the lungs. Like a
number of past projects these works employ continually unfolding systems to
determine the life of the work.
The following images, excerpted from a larger collection of related research,
serves as an appendix from which to think more broadly about the project
and its various associative relations: stubborn ruins, the destruction of
statuary by protestors, militants, ideologues and revolutionaries, colonial/
imperial symbology/architectures, intersections with pop culture/science
fiction, material degradation/sensitivity to natural forces, archeological
mystery and histories of sculpture. They also include several possibilities
for how the work/site that may be encountered and interacted with; by
lovers, hikers, campers, art viewers, and mariners; stoically, psychedelically,
absurdly, destructively, quietly, patiently and poetically.