jason haufe: Unintentional Defamation
29.07.26 - 22.08.26
Unintentional Defamation
Unintentional Defamation brings together a new body of collages by Jason Haufe that explores the uncertain relationship between abstraction and recognition. Across the exhibition, forms repeatedly seem to coalesce into faces, animals, machines, or fragments of landscape before dissolving again. What appears familiar remains unstable, suspended between perception and projection.
The works are constructed through an iterative process of copying, alteration, and reconstruction. Beginning with the printed patterns found inside security envelopes, Haufe subjects his source material to successive acts of reproduction, scaling, inversion, and collage. As these operations accumulate, the original image gradually disappears. Copying no longer serves to preserve an image but to transform it, allowing new forms to emerge through repetition.
Composition develops through continual revision. Fragments are added, removed, rotated, and reworked until relationships of rhythm, density, movement, and interval begin to settle. Acrylic paint and occasional relief interrupt the regularity of the photocopied surface, reinforcing the work's shifting relationship between image and object.
The exhibition's title, Unintentional Defamation, reflects the instability that runs throughout these works. Familiar forms repeatedly seem to emerge before dissolving again, leaving recognition suspended between the image and the viewer.
Without abandoning abstraction, Haufe's collages suggest that seeing is an active process. Meaning is not fixed within the image but continually formed and reformed through the act of looking.
