At first glance, the pages of Jason Jaworski’s book sea do not suggest the artist got his start making zines as a kid after fudging report cards at Kinko’s. Yet after rifling through his studio’s shelves, lingering signs of those rag-tag beginnings emerge. “It’s actually a Sanrio camera,” he said of the plastic half-frame apparatus he used to shoot his latest photo collection. “It used to have Hello Kitty on it, but I’ve used it so much it rubbed off.”
Each limited edition book in his new series MOIS, released once a month over the course of 2014, serve as travelogues. sea, now available at OC, documents the streets of Mexico City after a gas leak caused an unexpected explosion during his first visit to the city in January 2013. Jason channels that event in his collection in part by setting the cover image against charcoal and underneath a sheet of melted plastic. To enhance the effect of the explosion’s gritty aftermath, Jason’s developing process involved pummeling his negatives with boiling water, intentional light leaks, and sun exposure. MOIS launched at the 2014 Los Angeles Art Book Fair with his first edition, a limited collection of images from his travels in Taiwan entitled Rome Alone. “I’m a super book nerd, I love having books. So I just started making them myself,” he told us, gesturing to his packed bookshelves.
This month, we visited Jason in the home he shares with his girlfriend in Glendale. His former studio building in Downtown LA, where he had started working on paintings before shifting his energies back to his book projects, was recently bulldozed to the ground. Faced with the task of finding a new space, Jason hastily repurposed space in his kitchen into a home studio.
When we start to explore his studio, the first object Jason breaks out from his piles of oddities is a hand-carved wooden bust affixed with a black-and-white portrait, a treasure he originally discovered on his trip to Mexico. (The woman who sold it to him claimed looked like Elvis. “I was like, ‘That does not look like Elvis…!’” he joked, handing off the carving for us to inspect.) The bust served as inspiration for the MOIS series’ third book, so he returned to Mexico last month to find the man who makes them. Below, our conversation with Jason about the globetrotting behind his work from the witchcraft markets of Mexico City, to the radioactive regions of post-Fukushima Japan.
Shop Jason Jaworski's zines here
NOAH ADLER: So, all of the books in this series cover different cities?
JASON JAWORSKI: All the books are on cities. The next one is going to be with portraits that I did in Japan right after the earthquake.
When you went to Mexico City, did you have a plan?
I was just going with friends. I had always wanted to go, growing up on the border and loving Mexico. We wanted to see the crazy witchcraft market, Zocalo (the central plaza), and the pyramids. After the explosion, all the people I was with were like, “We gotta stay inside.” And I was like, “We gotta go outside!” So me and my friend Lewis would just walk around and take photos.
What was in the witchcraft market?
[Laughs] It was crazy. There were something like 20 goats crammed in a space the size of that couch you’re sitting on. I was with my friend, and she was like, “This is
Each limited edition book in his new series MOIS, released once a month over the course of 2014, serve as travelogues. sea, now available at OC, documents the streets of Mexico City after a gas leak caused an unexpected explosion during his first visit to the city in January 2013. Jason channels that event in his collection in part by setting the cover image against charcoal and underneath a sheet of melted plastic. To enhance the effect of the explosion’s gritty aftermath, Jason’s developing process involved pummeling his negatives with boiling water, intentional light leaks, and sun exposure. MOIS launched at the 2014 Los Angeles Art Book Fair with his first edition, a limited collection of images from his travels in Taiwan entitled Rome Alone. “I’m a super book nerd, I love having books. So I just started making them myself,” he told us, gesturing to his packed bookshelves.
This month, we visited Jason in the home he shares with his girlfriend in Glendale. His former studio building in Downtown LA, where he had started working on paintings before shifting his energies back to his book projects, was recently bulldozed to the ground. Faced with the task of finding a new space, Jason hastily repurposed space in his kitchen into a home studio.
When we start to explore his studio, the first object Jason breaks out from his piles of oddities is a hand-carved wooden bust affixed with a black-and-white portrait, a treasure he originally discovered on his trip to Mexico. (The woman who sold it to him claimed looked like Elvis. “I was like, ‘That does not look like Elvis…!’” he joked, handing off the carving for us to inspect.) The bust served as inspiration for the MOIS series’ third book, so he returned to Mexico last month to find the man who makes them. Below, our conversation with Jason about the globetrotting behind his work from the witchcraft markets of Mexico City, to the radioactive regions of post-Fukushima Japan.
Shop Jason Jaworski's zines here
NOAH ADLER: So, all of the books in this series cover different cities?
JASON JAWORSKI: All the books are on cities. The next one is going to be with portraits that I did in Japan right after the earthquake.
When you went to Mexico City, did you have a plan?
I was just going with friends. I had always wanted to go, growing up on the border and loving Mexico. We wanted to see the crazy witchcraft market, Zocalo (the central plaza), and the pyramids. After the explosion, all the people I was with were like, “We gotta stay inside.” And I was like, “We gotta go outside!” So me and my friend Lewis would just walk around and take photos.
What was in the witchcraft market?
[Laughs] It was crazy. There were something like 20 goats crammed in a space the size of that couch you’re sitting on. I was with my friend, and she was like, “This is