438 – 881 – 5464 – Montreal, 9am to 5pm.

info@jpking.ca

A child of two photographers, I cannot bring myself to photograph people, although everything I create wishes to be a portrait of some kind. I work primarily in the mediums of collage, text, and books, and occasionally with relational and installation-based projects. I focus heavily on story-telling techniques that attempt to unpack popular American & Canadian mythologies in whimsical and historically slippery ways.

Seeing the collage original not as an end, but instead as a means to a final print, I often enlarge my works to make visible the delicacy of the paper and ink used in a specific era of source imagery. Through my digital process the original becomes an inexhaustible plate from which variable prints will be pulled. In my collages, the grotesque and awkward gestures of the human body are emphasized through remixing body types, bits, features, and limbs, while seeking a beauty only found in discomfort. With nostalgia I hope to elicit unfolding family myths that can be recounted to a point of fiction.

I use language much like a painter uses a palette. I rely on absurdity to refrain from finger-pointing at what upsets me in the world. Humour becomes a practical device to deliver a softened sadness and emptiness that I know from wrestling with myself. In trying to understand my own masculinity, relationships, and fragmentary family unit, I am carrying, and laying to rest, a handful of feelings around heroship and failure.



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