Jason Shulman, Immerse at Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Fitzrovia, London, November 2024 – A cold November night in London, a thousand miles away from Summer swims in London Fields. Hackney-based artist Jason Shulman is why we’ve gone into town tonight when the sensible money would have been on the warmth of the studio. There was a need to see this new body of work all in one place at one time, see how it all comes together as one whole thing.  Jason Shulman’s work encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and film, often incorporating scientific experimentation, you might say his art and his various approaches are a little different. Story is, five years ago, Shulman took up swimming in his local pool, the London Fields Lido here in Hackney and soon he was swimming pretty much every day, “moving in a medium other than air” as he tell it. This, we are told, began to have a profound effect  on how he experienced his own body and “Once my head is under water, I am not subject to the usual earthbound forces. Gravity is different. It’s an otherworld. Alien. Viscous. Glassy. My only view is the  thousands of tiles beneath. And, because I wear a central snorkel, I can breathe, I am flying”.

“To create a visual language for experiencing the invisible forces of being within  water, Shulman experimented with all sorts of materials from pencil, paint and resin to upholstery pins, map pins, tacks, mosquito netting and wire scourers, applying them to different surfaces, like paper and mirror, or putting them behind frosted glass. Through the resulting series of wall-hung works and sculptures, Shulman engages with water from a fresh artistic perspective, managing to convey this  powerful multi-sensory but invisible encounter” 

Should it work? Does it work? All these materials, these different ways of conveying it, this scatter gun of approaches, surely this is going to be a bit of a dog’s dinner? Well it helps that this is a rather formal well lit space, it helps that the presentation of the work, the almost (positively) polite framing as well as the lighting unites the room and the pieces that are spread out over two floors. Yes, It really does work in here in the low light, under the spotlights, through the silhouettes of the viewers (there’s a more than healthy turn out on this cold cold opening night), and yes it really does all work as one body of work, as one collection, as one achievement, one whole thing and yes, ‘Visually representing the feeling of these fluid dynamics and turbulence is like trying  to paint the breeze, so I began looking at everything as potentially watery’.  You do feel the splash, the moment of suspension, the freshness, the refreshing thrill of it all, the sense of being immersed, of being somewhere else. I wonder if he’s achieved what he wanted to achieve? These pieces do feel like visual experiments, searches, did he do what he wanted to do? Is this the conclusion or this ongoing? You certainly do feel that splash, that shimmer of the water, the sun, that splendid isolation, you do get a sense of that other place, the water, the pool, his other world, you do get a positive sense of it all, a sense of his swimming ritual but something beyond just that, refreshing in more than just the obvious way. The different approaches work, there’s some beautiful work, delicate work, intriguing, incredibly sensitive drawings that convey that sense of a the pool being more than just a place to swim, it works as a viewer as the onlooker, as the reader of the pieces, it works from viewer’s point of view and yes, when you focus in on an individual piece, when you isolate pieces and take the time then yes, you are there… (sw)

Jason Shulman’s Immerse is at Rebecca Hossack Gallery until 22nd December 2024. The gallery is at 2a Conway Street, Fitzroy Square, London W1T 6BA. Open Monday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm.