By
Mike Landry
Prints taken from Jason
Fitzpatrick's back for "Bite and Burn."
After
the final print was taken off the freshly finished black stripe of a tattoo
running down Jason Fowler
Fitzpatrick’s spine, he was done with Bite and Burn. After a total of nine hours of tattooing in three
cities (Toronto, Vancouver and Sackville, NB), 80 bloody prints, and many death
metal and punk records his performance/installation sculpture was finished.
But
like a musician backstage listening to the roar of the crowd demanding more, Bite
and Burn kept calling Fitzpatrick back. Working with the original
performance sculpture’s components, but not extending the piece, Bite and
Burn, encore recaps the entirety of the original piece.
“The
totality of the sculpture was completed. So each individual piece was a part of
that. In my own mind it made logical sense to have something that signified
that. I didn’t know what that would be,” says Fitzpatrick. “I just started
taking things from [Bite and Burn] and building things in my studio.
Included
in the new installation are 60 prints of Fitzpatrick’s back from Bite and
Burn, a video piece collecting the original raw footage, 96 death metal-esque tour shirts for the Bite and Burn tour.
Fitzpatrick
has also built a Gyprock platform, upon which he was
tattooed again last Saturday while a rock band played below. Working with a
tattoo artist and printmaker, Fitzpatrick’s latest tattoo was inspired by
NSCAD’s lithography workshops. An edition of ten prints were
taken off his right chest.
It’s
easy to focus on the pain and labour involved in Bite and Burn, but
Fitzpatrick thinks that’s a superficial examination of his work. He’s more
interested in transformation and growth.
Transformation
is also the reason why Bite and Burn focuses on the tattoo. It stands in
as a ritual for transformation, and harkens back to Fitzpatrick’s own personal
history in the 80’s metal scene—a culture marked by hitchhiking to Montreal and
ritual-like activities like tattooing. It’s how he grew up and learned to be a
man.
“Pain
is not what I seek. It’s simply a consequence of an activity. There’s a lot of
things that people do that aren’t necessarily pleasant, but we want to do them
to get to the other side and be different than we were before.
“When
I go up against and push against something restrictive I tend to grow, like
when you’re at the gym and you push against something and your muscles grow. I
think that can happen to a person as well. When we push against authority and
the rules we tend to grow.”
Bite and Burn, encore is on
display until Tue February 8 at the Mount Saint
Vincent University Art Gallery
in Halifax.