Jason Hanasik: He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore

January 15 – Feburary 13, 2011

He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore is a photography project which engages image-making as a platform to intervene inside Western culture’s traditions and expectations related to masculinity, class, and heroism. This project opens up a space for a counter-narrative to exist. This new narrative focuses on individual experience, vulnerability, and intimacy as opposed to that which is enforced by the State, an impenetrable unit of men.

We, the men of these images and I, might not sit at an equal distance from the center, but we all have a complicated relationship to what is considered normal — to our benefit and our destruction.

Jason Hanasik was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1981. He received his MFA in Fine Arts with a focus in photography and video from California College of the Arts in 2009. Hanasik’s work has been exhibited internationally and his project “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore” was recognized by Aperture Magazine during their 2009 Portfolio Prize competition. Hanasik is currently an instructor for the City of San Francisco and at the ASUC Art Studio at the University of California at Berkeley.