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Wednesday Edition: Jason Burch

Ringside by Jason Burch
8"x10" ($20) | 11"x14" ($50) | 16"x20" ($200)

Happy Wednesday collectors! It's Sara here to introduce a photo edition that we've been looking forward to releasing for months. I know that when everyone at 20x200 HQ huddles around the proofs of a new print, we're on to something good.

The bunch of us here represent a broad range of tastes in art, so it's not often that we all take an interest in the same image. But when this proof was unfurled, everyone wanted to take a closer look, and inevitably, every looker laughed—then lingered to look some more. Since then, Jen and I have been fielding "when are we going to release that one-black-and-white-image-with-the-two-guys-fighting-in-front-of-the-TV-set?" from all four corners of the office. Without further ado, here it is.

Ringside is deceptively simple and smart. One of a series of photomontages by Jason Burch, it's part of a larger experimental practice in art-making. As in the first two photographs we released from him, Natural Selections XI and Natural Selections XIII, Jason's interest in the rich tradition—from Hannah Hoch to David Hockney—of creating and re-creating meaning in photographs by plainly altering, omitting and adding information is clear. But where Jason's other images are more cerebral, Ringside is both sophisticated and a little silly—offering a potent one-two punch (couldn't resist).

Composed of just two carefully selected and layered images, Ringside is a Mad Men-ish mise-en-scène full of alternate realities—a perfect counterpart to Jessica Bruah's Untitled #6. Jessica staged her own set but Jason's images were pre-existing, culled from a home catalogue and a 1918 book on practical self-defense. While the boxing figures on TV look as if they could be leaning in for a kiss were it not for those gloves, the two men in the foreground aren't holding back.

Clever and a little nostalgic, this print makes a good gift for dad—even if (especially if!) he's never been one to get your thing for art. I'm betting upon getting this, he will crack a grin. After he laughs, you can impress him and tell him all about—as Jen likes to call it—the thinky art stuff—if you want. And maybe, just maybe, he'll start seeing it the way you do. At the least, he will be inclined, like the rest of us here, to take a longer look.

More editions for dads: