ERIC HART JR, MISTER MISTER, 2023
“When I Think About Power and Mister Mister Series were both based on poems. I took things in my journal and played with them as an idea to write about or expand upon visually. I think all of my work is rooted in words that I have written. But when writing, I don’t have the end goal of a series in mind. I am just writing.
I was a Google Fellow last year. The series opened last month, but it was a 10-month program, and we all had mentors. Lyle Ashton Harris was my mentor and another inspiration for me. We worked through a photo series from start to finish, and my photo series was titled Mister Mister. It was based on the Shakespeare quote, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ I challenged that in my artist statement and followed up by asking- if all the world’s a stage, for whom is the show? I really wanted to tackle this idea of performance and what it means to perform as a black queer man in the world on a daily basis. I thought about behaviour, how we act and how we present ourselves. I pay attention to those things because I am working them out as a human.
That’s where the inspiration came from for the work. It was a really fun series to work on because it was campy, theatrical, and heavily researched. I researched theatrical forms of performance, such as minstrel shows, comedy and tragedy masks. I dove into what those things mean and what theories have been read about the way black people perform, such as the double consciousness or black skin white mask. All those things brought together this really cool series. I’m working on extending it because it was only ten images, but I really fell in love with creating it.” - Elephant