Michael Moynihan: Artist thinks outside the box by linking character to location

By slowing down, we can see things in an entirely different light, Jason O'Gorman tells Michael Moynihan

Thu, 13 Aug, 2020 - 07:55

Arnold Schwarzenegger on the South Link. King Kong climbing Shandon and swatting away fighter planes. Poseidon wading through the South Channel. Alfred Hitchcock loitering outside The Raven.

Looking at Jason O’Gorman’s artworks can be a disconcerting experience.

By day a graphic designer with his own shop, Dynamite Studios, by night he transforms Cork into a catwalk for Imperial Stormtroopers, a posse of Pope, and Matrix agents. Once you’ve seen a picture of Gollum peering into the window of Keanes Jewellers on Oliver Plunkett St, evaluating the quality of the rings on offer, can you ever see that part of the city the same way again?

I tracked Jason down because in the current climate, with re-opening and re-imagining two of the key notions in circulation in the city, I wasn’t just interested in how he comes up with these ideas.

I was also interested in how someone switches from the business of graphic design to the work of reshaping a city with his imagination.

“How I got started in this area in the first place was through drawing,” he told me.

“As a young fella drawing was my skill years ago, and that got me my first job in graphic design. There were no computers then, so everything was hand-drawn.

“Twenty-five years on I’m doing my own thing, but I stopped the drawing because computers came along. It’s only two years ago I thought I’d take up the drawing again — purely as a pastime, a bit of crack.

The Elysian, true story. pic.twitter.com/3thXjk0ZB0
— Jason💥Gorman (@jogcork) July 24, 2020

“But people who saw them took a shine to them, and started saying, ‘I’d love to buy one’, so I started putting them up on my website (jasonogorman.ie).

“It’s a mix of Cork stuff, funny maps and so on, and the drawings fitted in there.” Fair enough. So taking the skills he uses every day was step one. But how did that twist come — the recasting of the cityscape as a stylised landscape, peopled by characters from the big screen?

By combining those skills with his imagination: “When I looked at this area a couple of years ago I saw that there were plenty of other people drawing pictures of Cork.

“In that sense it got a bit boring, and also because I wasn’t in the images — by that I mean my thoughts and ideas weren’t part of them.

“So to put my own stamp on them, my personality, I started to incorporate some of those images from my own interests — I like those movies and TV series, I enjoy a bit of fun, a bit of sci-fi, a bit of madness — that’s what differentiates them and that was my way into them — my angle, if you like.

“Watching those movies and enjoying them, that helped my personality to seep out into the images. That’s what makes them a little bit more engaging.” Hence the images. As he puts it, sometimes the link between the character and their location makes immediate sense.

“Some are pretty obvious. Having Bruce Lee out the Lee Fields is a pretty easy connection, so is having Joe Exotic, the Tiger King, outside Tiger in Patrick St.

Captain #Cork pic.twitter.com/O3qtwIkJxl
— Jason💥Gorman (@jogcork) July 29, 2020

“Sometimes the connection is obvious — Albert Einstein on Albert Quay would be one, I did the Pope on Pope’s Quay. Gollum looking into Keanes Jewellers on Oliver Plunkett St.

“I was passing the Flying Enterprise bar down by the South Gate Bridge one day and it hit me — imagine Captain Picard coming out of there after a few drinks, his head hanging off him, the Borg ship in the sky over him...

“You leave the imagination go and sometimes that connection is there.

“Sometimes it’s not. Putting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the South Link as the Terminator wasn’t as obvious a connection. I had that scene in the movie in my head, where he stops the motorbike and turns around, pointing the shotgun back behind him. I was wondering where in Cork that could happen and that fit.

“What happens is you’re taking the whole world and shrinking it down to the size of Cork, and then wondering, ‘what’s the place in Cork that corresponds to what I’m thinking about?’” And this is the crux of it. Taking the time to step back and see the city anew is something everyone is charged with, even if it’s an unofficial responsibility rather than explicit command.

The trouble, however, is how to manage that. The pace of life before the lockdown wasn’t conducive to that kind of appraisal, but a summer passed at a slower pace should make better observers of us all.

Can we all wear Neckerchiefs instead of masks, and make #Cork feel like the Wild West when the saloons open? #WesternRoad pic.twitter.com/T2552frHUE
— Jason💥Gorman (@jogcork) June 20, 2020

O’Gorman’s experience certainly suggests so.

“There’s no harm done at all in looking at things differently, and when you do that it can open up entirely new trains of thought about the city, or your own particular locality, about how to do things in a different way, how to approach them.

“I was only saying to my wife lately that when I was commuting in and out to work I was travelling the same road every day, obviously — and I cycle, so it’s flying in and flying out — and then when I’m at home I’m like everyone else, bringing kids to Tae-kwon-do and piano and all of that.

“You’re going and going, running and racing, but when the lockdown started I began to walk that same road in and out for the exercise, and when you’re doing the same route by foot it’s totally different.

“You’re slower. You notice different things. What you take in isn’t the same as when you’re travelling a lot faster.

“You see things you haven’t seen before, like an ESB box I passed with a cool drawing on it. I’d never noticed that before.

“It opens up so much more, when you slow down and have a different take on things.”

Anyone hear the thunder in #Cork Norseside this evening? pic.twitter.com/iLUAWMnfSt
— Jason💥Gorman (@jogcork) June 16, 2020

The old Russian literary theorists had a name for this — ostranenie, or making something strange. You see something that’s always been part of the background, but by presenting it an unfamiliar way you draw attention to it and force a reappraisal.

This isn’t a process that should be restricted to literature; it’s a tactic that bears fruit when deployed to consider the environment.

“I’m consciously thinking outside the box and looking for a different way to see things,” says O’Gorman.

“I have another drawing of Shandon and it’s underwater, with an octopus and deep-sea divers near it, a post-apocalyptic scene.

“But you could have Shandon in the desert, in a barren landscape, or on a different planet — and that makes you look at the real Shandon in a different way.

“Then there’s the great wave of Blakaracka.” No need for panic on the Mahon coastline. O’Gorman took the famous illustration, The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, and let his imagination run wild. Hence the juxtaposition of Blackrock Castle and an enormous, looming wave.

“While I was looking at the original I thought, ‘what if that wave came up the Lee?’ “I enjoy putting ideas like that together, it’s fun for me and I think that fun comes through and helps people to consider things differently.”