Jason Mann purges the past with collage-like ‘time capsules’

The textured, collage-like paintings created by Jason Mann are so layered, so dense with detail, that the artist said he could spend days unpacking the many stories embedded in each canvas.

One painting, for instance, incorporates black serpents – a recurring image that Mann traced to a story told by his mother during his childhood years spent growing up in Falmouth, Kentucky.

“She talked about how one day she was mowing the grass at the house we lived in when I was really small and she ran over a black snake in our backyard,” Mann said in an early August interview at Secret Studio, where his new exhibit, “TH13TEEN,” kicks off with an opening on Friday, Sept. 13, featuring musical performances from Sarah Asher and Chris Castle. “And she said there were all these snakes that started shooting out of its mouth. And I said, ‘Mom, that can’t happen. That’s a nightmare.’”

Mann, who creates under the moniker theartofmann, similarly blurs the line between fantasy and reality in his own surrealist works, which combine techniques ranging from collage and painting to experiments with artificial intelligence. In general, Mann said he will start by taking the canvas and attaching large sheets of wrinkled paper with contact cement, which creates a textured, stable base on which to begin layering. He’ll then continue painting and incorporating photos clipped from magazines, copies of photographs and features snipped from the pages of old newspapers – all pulled from an oversized bin in which he stores various printed materials that hold some personal resonance. 

“It has to have some residue, almost, like a totem or some kind of ghost,” said the artist, who added that his creations in this way almost double as “time capsules.”

While the works might begin in a similar manner, each takes a wildly different road to completion – a reality Mann traced to a deep resistance to routine.

“That was another reason working with AI appealed to me, because I don’t think we’re capable of doing something truly random,” said Mann, who would photograph his in-progress art and feed the pictures into AI, creating new images based on the pieces that he could then print off and incorporate back into the original. “With artwork, it’s really all about experimenting. And so, what I’ll do is that when a painting starts to look good, I’ll ruin it, because what’s the point of just being like, ‘Oh, this looks great.’ … But even then, I would catch myself doing the same things. I have an old can of white latex paint, and I keep it really watered down and let it get really crusty so you can just slap it up on the canvas. And then it’s like, ‘Well, shit. Now that’s becoming a go-to thing.’ And AI has become a way to inject this randomness that really is random.”

Working gradually, painstakingly, Mann builds up each canvas in this way, creating new messes and mistakes that need to be addressed, finding new ways to solve these self-inflicted wounds, and then repeating this process until “I don’t see anything else on the canvas that needs to be resolved.”

The outward creative process is also intimately linked with an internal purging, Mann said, describing how images will implant themselves in his mind and then remain until he can release them to the canvas.

“I’m sure it has something to do with being an artist and a painter, but I’m so image-oriented that if I think of something, it’s going to live with me until I do something with it,” said Mann, who created this particular body of work as a means to finally free himself of some of the images that have swirled in his head for years – a motley collection of snakes, skulls, women, melting Salvador Dali clocks, Eastern iconography and various mathematical symbols. 

With this show, Mann said, he was also able to resolve incomplete past works that had long haunted him. One massive, three-panel painting on display in “TH13TEEN,” for instance, started with a single panel Mann initiated in 2004, and which has served as the artist’s version of the beating heart beneath the floorboards from the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale in the two decades since.

“I’d be sitting around, and at the most random time I would think about that stupid thing, like, ‘What am I going to do with that?’” said Mann, who noted that the painting has accompanied him to two states and has been stored in six different studios and a trio of storage units before finding finished form in the piece displayed at Secret Studio.

Indeed, Mann said he finally knew he was done creating art for “TH13TEEN” when he sat down in his studio to paint some weeks back and the image that started to emerge felt wholly removed from the work he had been doing over the last couple of years. “And it wasn’t that I disliked it, but I knew it wasn’t one of these,” Mann said. “And that’s when I knew. It was like, ‘I’m done.’”