A boat that don’t float — Jason de Haan’s Where the Ocean Meets This Guy

Where the Ocean Meets This Guy brilliantly exemplifies Jason de Haan’s ability to mine rich humour from the inanimate. His 2006 piece in Truck’s FLOW exhibit, I know all the songs that the cowboys know ’cause I heard them on the radio was a mountainous sculpture — an entangled mess, made from 30 metres of polyester-stuffed denim and two cowboy boots, humourlessly connoting a sense of entrapment in an absurdist situation. Equally witty was his piece Keepin' On Keepin' On, a take on Samuel Beckett’s lines in Waiting for Godot:

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?

Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

Estragon: (Highly excited.) An erection!

The delicate line drawing portrayed the lower half of a human body hanging upside down, suspended at the ankle by a rope snare. A slight bulge was visible in the crotch of the pants.

At Stride, de Haan’s recent work mimics Buster Keaton’s penchant for maritime mayhem. Keaton heralds high-sea hilarity in The Navigator and The Love Nest, but it is Keaton’s 1921 slapstick The Boat that de Haan’s six metre, one-man sailboat is most reminiscent of. In The Boat, Keaton’s handmade boat, The Damfino, is constructed in his basement and is, of course, too large to get through the door. When he drives off with it in tow, the side of his house, then the house itself, collapses. At the harbour, he rides the boat out only to have it sink beneath him. Encased within Stride, de Haan’s structure has an added level of absurdity — his constructed boat is miles and miles away from any ocean. Nor is it seaworthy.

De Haan loves boat analogies, quoting influences from iconic signifiers like Captain Morgan, Poopdeck Pappy, the folklore of the Flying Dutchman, and Dutch-Californian artist Bas Jan Ader de Haan (the man who was last seen in 1975 when he took off in the smallest boat ever to attempt to cross the Atlantic). The piece not only highlights de Haan’s interest in sailing, and a fondness for creating pieces that quote writers as well as visual, multimedia and pop-cultural artists, but is also a formal response to the space it inhabits. The creaking floors of an occupied gallery space overhead recall the swell and pressure of water against the body of a wooden vessel at sea.

The gallery itself has had a history of floods. The Project Room, as the title of the space, is befitting. It is not accidental that the space itself is reminiscent of a basement workshop. De Haan took all these factors into account while creating this site-specific piece.

de Haan will be constructing his landlocked boat until the closing reception on October 5. Visitors are able to take delight in the process by taking note of the objects in the space that signify a bodily presence. Piles of books about seafaring are seen piled against the wall, from Will Dawson’s Ahoy There to Prairie Boys Afloat by George Zarn. Discarded empty cigarette packs and cans of pop are pointed remnants of the work-process and signal his hope and yearning to be at sea.

In its well-aimed sledgehammer blows, de Haan's work is a reflection on mordant humour and is a witty mining of cinematic and art historical references — stating that sailing is ultimately romantic, and that boats are handy despite the futility of being enclosed within a gallery in a basement.