"He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore utilizes image-making as a wedge 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, one that focuses on individual experience, vulnerability, and intimacy rather than that which is enforced by the State: an impenetrable unit.

"We, the men of these images and myself, 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

Editorial Statement

Despite commonly held assumptions, complex visual treatments of straight male masculinity are hard to come by. One could even argue that artists avoid the subject, perhaps for fear of veering uncontrollably into the realm of homoeroticism, a trap of sorts that presents itself at both the most and least overt ends of the masculine continuum.

In light of this trend, Jason Hanasik's (b. 1981) He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore is quite remarkable. Invoking the Soldier—commonly a tired, shop-worn masculine trope—Hanasik upends expectations, creating a beguiling portrayal of a gender (and military) in limbo, where individual men struggle to navigate the cultural expectations put upon them. Try as they might to contain it, emotion and vulnerability permeate the lives of Hanasik's soldiers, Steven and Patrick, as they vacillate between the hyper-masculine world of military service and the more delicate reality of their home lives. Steven's self-portraits, taken on duty in Iraq, show him in various states of composure, sometimes confident and collected, sometimes weary or mournful. Patrick's expressions are more cautious, perhaps reflecting a self-consciousness about how the camera could cast him. Even so, Patrick's surroundings betray his sensitivities—whether basking in a beam of sunlight or standing by his front door, complete with a "welcome" sign that bears an uncanny resemblance to him, Patrick's softer side emerges tacitly from his shell.

The portfolio is also striking in that it occupies an indistinct sexual space very comfortably. Hanasik, who is openly gay, won his subjects' trust to such an extent that, in portraying them as the multifaceted people that they are, he was allowed to photograph them in traditionally homoerotic poses—Patrick in bed, Steven in a meadow. It is a testament to Hanasik's skill both as an artist and curator (since he did not take all of these photos himself) that these images do not tip the project into an overly sexualized realm. Rather, they serve to question not so much Patrick or Steven's personal sexuality, but the relevance of the impulse to determine sexual preference in dry, finite terms, when so often reality is more complicated. Hanasik portrays his subjects, and by extension, men at large, as enigmatic conflations of seemingly opposing qualities: they are guarded, yet open; hardened, yet sensitive. His work questions our proclivities to pigeonhole and underestimate, encouraging us to find comfort in our ambiguities and emotion where we least expect it.
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Jason Hanasik (b. 1981) has an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA and a BFA Summa Cum Laude from the State University of New York at Purchase. Hanasik is currently an instructor at the ASUC Art Studio at the University of California at Berkeley. His work has been exhibited widely and published in various journals and publications. This spring a portfolio of his project, "He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore," will be published in the Society for Photographic Education's journal Exposure with a thoughtful essay by the artist, critic and curator Tammy Rae Carland. Hanasik is represented by +Kris Graves Projects in Brooklyn, New York. www.jasonhanasik.com